


Resurrection x and x Reconciliation

by Ihc



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Aftermath of canon violence, Canon - Anime, Canon-Typical Violence, Dialogue Heavy, Friendship, Gen, Hey Its Me The Fluff Fairy, Hey Revolutionary Concept Gon Is Not A Sociopath He Is A Traumatized Child, Hurt/Comfort, Pitou Did Several Things Wrong But Still Deserves Life And Happiness, Post-Canon Fix-It, Psychological Trauma, Reconciliation, Redemption, The Worlds Most Complicated Pitou's Gender Headcanon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 04:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15700275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ihc/pseuds/Ihc
Summary: After an unusual property of Neferpitou’s Nen abilities causes her to survive her fight with Gon, he must confront his worst enemy a third time. But he finds that the monster he nearly gave his life to kill was only ever a product of his own mind.Set after Episode 148, contains Gon/Pitou/Killua friendship, shameless fix fic trash. Rated T for gore, mild language, and brief nudity, but nothing more severe than was already in the Chimera Ant Arc.





	1. Will x To x Survive

The forest surrounding the old mansion in the countryside of East Gorteau was peaceful, tranquil even. The cool morning air was perfectly still. The ancient spruce and fir trees obstructed vision, so for any observer on the ground the only sign that anything unusual had happened would have been the silence. Birds and other animals had yet to return. But from the air, it was clear that overnight the place had become a battlefield. Starting close to the building, a straight path of destruction ran nearly a mile through the forest. The trees were so large that when the site of the mansion was cleared decades earlier, it had taken teams of lumberjacks over a day to cut down each one, but now the trunks were splintered like matchsticks. The ground was gouged in places, severed tree roots sticking out of the soil like rebar from the rubble of a collapsed building. Outcrops of rock had been pulverized, and boulders flung hundreds of meters by an almost inconceivable force. And, a short distance from where the path finally ended, in the center of a circle large enough to hold a baseball game in where the trees had been charred and flattened and the ground stripped to bedrock and melted to glass, lay a single still body.

From a distance, the corpse could have been mistaken for a human, but the four-fingered hands, the long tail, and the bloodstains, once deep blue and now blue-black after hours of exposure to air, betrayed it to the knowledgeable few as a Chimera Ant. If such an informed observer had been there, they might have noted the missing head with some concern. The first generations of soldiers born with human genes could survive with their head and body separated for over a day. But the later generations, with more and more human DNA mixed in and a less insect-like physiology, had lost this ability. And even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing left of the head, and the body’s vital organs had been destroyed by the blackened, shriveled remnants of a human arm that had impaled its thorax. The Ant was dead, its body cooled and all cellular activity ceased. And yet… and yet there was still a spark of life energy within the corpse, one that was growing stronger with every passing minute.

When Neferpitou’s head was crushed, her Nen ability, Terpsichora, remained active, and even grew in power, fueled by the Royal Guard’s unbreakable resolve to protect her king. Terpsichora, unlike a similar ability used by the Phantom Troupe member Shalnark, was designed to remain under Pitou’s direct control, increasing her strength more efficiently than a Specialist could with Ryu due to the distance between that type and Enhancement. However, with no neural signals to direct it, Terpsichora had reverted to the programming of the ability it was developed from: Puppeteer. It flung Pitou’s corpse at its target mindlessly, but with immense speed and power, attempting to carry out its user’s dying wish.

But the spark of life was _not_ Terpsichora. As strong as the resolve driving the ability even after Pitou’s death was, there was a conflict. Her final thoughts had been satisfaction that Gon Freecs had, in gaining the power to kill her, destroyed himself, and she had succeeded in protecting the King from him. Gon’s last Jajanken, the strongest, was still not enough to completely destroy Pitou’s body and leave Terpsichora with nothing to use as a puppet. But it took the last of Gon’s borrowed power. His transformation collapsed, his aura vanished as he paid the price for his reckless vow, and as Killua carried the boy away, Terpsichora finally burnt out, its last instruction complete.

However, Terpsichora was an unusual ability. After Pitou’s death, it reverted to Puppeteer’s programming, and created a dense shroud of aura encompassing her body, shielding it and preventing it from disintegrating under the force of its own attacks, and that aura still had Pitou’s ‘fingerprint.’ As a result, when Pitou’s soul started to leave her body it was ‘reflected’ by the shroud of aura and trapped, partially bound, even after Terpsichora dissipated. The metaphysics of such an event were unknown to science, due to the immense rarity of the circumstances required – a self-targeting manipulation ability persisting as Residual Nen after the user’s death with it active. But it happened. Normally, nothing would have changed: the soul would eventually lose its connection to the body as it decayed. But this was the exception. What happened couldn’t really be called a conscious thought, because consciousness was impossible with a brain reduced to fine droplets splattered around her penultimate resting place against a tree. But _something_ stirred within the Ant. More than an emotion, it was a primal drive that had been buried beneath her devotion to the King. It wasn’t the instinct of a Royal Guard, it was something human, and feline, and part of all the other species whose genes had been merged with those of the Queen to create Pitou: the will to live.

As the hours passed, that drive grew stronger. Pitou’s corpse was still silent and motionless, not even a flicker of electrical nerve activity, but a thick black aura began to seep from it and spread across the ground like fog. In the hours since Gon’s final Jajanken some leaves had blown into the scoured area. They started to smoke, then crumbled into ash. Any observer would have noticed the sky seem to darken. The aura formed itself into tendrils, rising into the air and arcing, twisting, merging and twining around each other in a chaotic mass, like tangled yarn. But within the convolution one pattern kept reoccurring. A straight line, with a helix coiled around it – a snake coiled around a staff. It was a symbol Pitou had seen in one of Peggy’s books: the Rod of Asclepius. In the aura on the ground and in the tendrils, eyes began to open – hundreds of them, thousands, burning red and yellow with more eyes swimming and rolling in their pupils, and Pitou’s _other_ ability activated for the first time.

The first Nen ability Pitou developed was Doctor Blythe, intended to simply piece the white-haired human’s dismembered body back together and regenerate the flesh in the absence of his own life force. Pitou thought of the body as nothing more than an elaborate puzzle, and believed this would be enough. But it wasn’t: all she got was a better-looking corpse. The medical textbooks held no answers besides telling her what she wanted was impossible, but other books, what Peggy called ‘mythology’, provided tantalizing clues. Life energy came from something linked to the body, but intangible, the thing which had somehow survived when some of the humans were eaten and merged with the new ants created with their DNA, resulting in many of them being born with human memories. Pitou just had to get it back somehow. That was the idea behind her second attempt at a healing ability: Asclepius.

But Asclepius had never worked. It hadn’t even activated properly, not when trying to bring back the white-haired human, or any of the dead animals or even unfortunate grunt ants Pitou tested it on. Unable to figure out the problem, she soon abandoned it and developed Puppeteer, which turned out to be unsatisfying, yet useful. What Pitou didn’t know was that she never met a critical requirement for Asclepius, one not set by a Nen restriction but by the nature of the intended task.

Bringing back a dead person with Nen was generally considered impossible, but this was not the case. It was merely _almost_ impossible. It required a particular kind of specialist aura, and the amount of aura required to overcome the energy barrier between life and death was immense. Only two or three Nen users in history had ever managed it. It was so much that without adding extra restrictions it would have used more aura than even Pitou, the strongest of the Royal Guards, had. But by chance Pitou had chosen a restriction that, technically, she met herself, along with the other requirement.

Neferpitou’s body began to twitch and smoke. The tendrils of aura curled inward, winding their way through it. Clear liquid started to leak from the stump of her neck, forming a puddle on top of the black aura. It congealed, forming a milky gel which hardened into a spiderweb of thin filaments of bone. The mesh worked its way outward and upward, bending into a bowl shape, and the strands thickened as more protoplasm flowed up them, as if icicles were somehow growing into the shape of a geodesic dome.

Asclepius was an exponential improvement on Doctor Blythe in terms of healing ability, relying purely on life energy to regenerate tissue, and using a complex algorithm – though Pitou didn’t know the term – to prioritize tasks and minimize the usage of both material and aura. Her aura was actually comparatively inefficient at healing. Even Doctor Blythe’s slow regeneration used more energy than an En with an average radius of over a kilometer, and Asclepius worked much faster, but also used much more aura. The ability had to be efficient. It started with the central nervous system and associated structures – first the brain and the skull, then the spine, including both the neck and the gaping hole in the thoracic vertebrae created by Gon’s arm. The tendrils of aura touched the severed limb, and it dissolved into black sludge.

At full strength, Pitou would have just barely had enough aura to complete a successful resurrection, but with her soul already tenuously connected to her body the hardest part was made substantially easier. However, she wasn’t at full strength. Days of sleep deprivation, continuous use of En, repeated activation of Doctor Blythe, and finally the fatal battle and Terpsichora’s postmortem reactivation had left her with about two thirds of her normal POP. It wasn’t enough. To avoid creating new material out of thin air Asclepius was pulling material from the rest of Pitou’s body, hollowing out bones and thinning muscles to rebuild the lost portions. It was able to recreate her head and restore her vital organs – her heart had been crushed and lungs and stomach ruptured by Gon’s severed arm. It was even able to fix most of the broken bones and torn tendons and ligaments, although just with thin threads of tissue, the equivalent of a welder tacking pieces of steel together to keep them in the right shape until a permanent joint could be made.

But there was just too much damage. After the mile-long flight through the forest, Terpsichora’s strings and reinforcing aura were the only thing holding the bones of Pitou’s left arm and right leg together, and the final Jajanken had caused even more damage to both bones and soft tissue. Before Asclepius’s work was done, Pitou ran out of aura. The ability kept functioning for another second and a half, further cannibalizing Pitou’s body for the power and material to complete the final step – sending the right nerve impulses in the right sequence in the heart and brain. Then it too burned out. The thousands of eyes closed or simply disappeared as the black aura dissipated, and what was left rose into the air as what looked like a cloud of smoke before it, too, vanished. Neferpitou’s heart began to beat again, she sucked in a breath, and her eyes snapped open.

 

It took Pitou a moment to make sense of the new sensations, and the memories flooding back into her head. Bright light, daylight, in her eyes. No sound. It was day – it should have been night. Silence. Pain, so much pain, it shouldn’t have even been possible for this much pain to exist. No aura… this was wrong. Gon? Where was Gon?

Pitou had no idea of what had happened after the first Jajanken had struck her, aside from a vague memory of tumbling helplessly through the forest until she came to rest against a tree. But she knew she shouldn’t be alive. Had Gon… had he let her live? No, that was impossible! She’d felt it in his aura: his hatred, his intent to kill, was absolute. It was as strong as her own resolve to eliminate him, perhaps even stronger. Pitou’s heart quickened. Had he left her and gone after the King? That power, that terrible aura… if he was able to return to the palace, the King would be in grave danger! And it was much later now… if something had happened…

No. Pitou still couldn’t make her body move, but she mentally shook herself. That too was impossible. The power the boy had gained was impossible to sustain. She figured at a minimum, he’d paid for it with his ability to use Nen, and most likely even with his life, and she had delayed him for long enough that he couldn’t have put off the inevitable long enough to reach the King. If she was alive, that could only mean it had happened faster than she expected. She’d been launched a long way away… had he died or lost his power before he was able to reach her? She couldn’t feel his aura, but with En…

But she couldn’t use En. Worse, Pitou realized with horror, she couldn’t use _anything_. It was like being in a state of Zetsu, but without even the pressure of the aura trying to escape. Even her Ten was gone. For a creature who had been able to use Nen from her first moment of consciousness, its absence was panic-inducing. It was like being blinded and paralyzed at the same time, and it was made worse with the knowledge that she was completely defenseless. In this state, the hatred Gon had directed at her while she healed Komugi in the palace could have killed her, let alone the aura he’d released at the mansion.

Even worse than the helplessness was the pain. When Pitou intentionally broke her left arm to try to appease the furious child, she’d taken a calculated risk. The small cuts and bruises she’d sustained in that glorious first fight with the white-haired human – Kite, she remembered Gon saying his name – hadn’t been a problem, and remembering how calm the King was when he tore his own arm off, she thought a broken one would be easy. But she’d misjudged things. Even though she’d intentionally made the break clean so it could be healed quickly, the pain made it much harder to concentrate, especially with Gon’s aura bearing down on her. She’d managed to keep her face from showing how much it hurt, but for the whole hour she was afraid she’d slip for a moment, and either Doctor Blythe would falter for a crucial moment and cost Komugi her life, or the extremely weak Ten she could maintain with the ability active would fail and the hateful aura would tear her apart. She was amazed by the King’s superior willpower and pain tolerance. Even though she was confident she could have killed Gon with one arm – prior to his transformation at least – she repaired the break as soon as she had an opportunity. This, though? This was on another level.

Against her will, Pitou rolled onto her side and doubled over, knees against her chest and breath tight in her throat. It was difficult to even tell where and how she was injured: the pain was so intense, and seemed to be everywhere at once. The hasty repair she’d done to her left arm with Doctor Blythe had failed, and the break seemed to be worse than before, with bone fragments poking against the skin. Her right leg was broken in multiple places, and couldn’t be moved in any coherent way. Her left leg felt like it was broken as well. She was visually able to confirm that she could move it, but only with great effort and she couldn’t actually feel where it was. Her head was throbbing with every heartbeat – unsurprising, she knew she’d been hit in the face and knocked out despite putting most of her aura into defending her head – and her abdomen and chest were definitely severely damaged, again unsurprisingly. Gon’s kick was much weaker than his Jajanken, but it had caught her off guard. Most of her aura had been in her limbs, powering the attack she’d hoped would end the fight before Gon could use his superior strength, and she had no time to protect herself. Ribs had to be broken, maybe her sternum as well. The muscles were torn and bruised, and she could only hope no internal organs were crushed.

It was impossible to function like this, impossible to even move. She had to use Doctor Blythe to repair at least some of the damage. Opening her abdomen to check for internal organ damage was too risky: Doctor Blythe operated semiautonomously but if she lost consciousness it would disappear, with fatal consequences. But she could at least fix her leg. Forgetting that she couldn’t use Nen, she tried to activate the healing construct, but again nothing happened. Again the failure of her powers brought feelings of fear and helplessness, and that caused her breathing to speed up. But breathing too was painful.

She recognized the potential vicious cycle and was able to suppress it, but there was another sensation brought on by the pain. A wave of nausea hit her. Nausea… that was supposed to be the body’s reaction to poisoning, but that made no sense. Nothing should have poisoned her. She gagged, and that only made her chest hurt even more. She had to stop this too… could she stop it? She remembered in her research on the human brain mention of the autonomic and non-autonomic nervous systems. No, this was a reflex that was impossible to control with conscious effort. Retching, she managed to push herself onto her hands and knees – or rather, one hand since her left arm couldn’t support any weight.

After Gon had impaled his arm through Pitou’s chest, blood and interstitial fluid had pooled in her ruptured lungs and the rest of her thoracic cavity. As Asclepius repaired the area, it attempted to clear her lungs by moving the fluid – along with the dissolved remnants of said arm – into the closest available open space: her stomach. Even if she’d been able to fully heal herself, her body wouldn’t have tolerated its presence for long.

She retched again, and a wave of soupy blue-black liquid, mostly congealed blood and dissolved tissue, surged up her throat and spilled onto the charred ground. The way her arm was positioned to keep her balance, it was in the way too, but the cramping of her damaged muscles was so painful the rest of her body was paralyzed. Pitou had retained a feline instinct for cleanliness, and the sensation of the warm, sticky liquid splashing over her hand and soaking through the sleeve of her jacket, combined with the metallic taste of blood – noticeably and disgustingly different from human blood – mixed with the bitterness of stomach acid, made her feel even sicker. Tears were streaming down her face now, half from the pain and half from another reflex, and mixing with the puddle of vomit. Even when it seemed like her stomach had to be completely empty, the cramps and spasms wouldn’t stop, and more kept coming up. She fell back onto her side, coughing and shivering.

Eventually the nausea subsided, but the pain didn’t. She was starting to get control of it enough to think clearly, though. Blood… she’d vomited blood. Coughing up a little wasn’t necessarily fatal since it could be caused by bleeding in the sinuses dripping into the throat, but with the amount that came up the only logical conclusion was severe internal bleeding, probably from a ruptured stomach. She was, technically, correct, but unaware that the damage had already been healed. Her pulse quickened. This was bad. Even with Doctor Blythe functional the surgery would be dangerous to perform on herself. She had to return to the palace.

Pitou tried to stand, but it was impossible. Her legs gave way under her weight, the right one crumpling with a sharp, stabbing pain that brought tears to her eyes again. Her left leg hurt, but balancing on it and hopping, even leaping forward should have been easy. But her body just wouldn’t respond. Her leg might have had the strength left to support her weight, if only just, but her head felt like it was filled with ice water. Her reactions were too slow to even keep her balance. What had happened to her Nen? For the first time, she noticed the circular area of destruction she lay in the center of. This had to have come from another attack, one she didn’t remember, but unconscious she should have been defenseless, and Gon should have killed her easily if he’d reached her. Again, she remembered her research on the brain. She knew it was possible for it to remain functional without forming memories – a ‘black-out.’ Evidently this was what had happened. Instead of falling unconscious, she had kept fighting, and somehow stayed alive for long enough to outlast Gon’s monstrous transformation.

Even though Pitou knew this was a victory, it felt like a failure. If she hadn’t let her sympathy for the boy overcome her judgement… she could have killed him. She could have killed him from the moment Pouf called her to tell her Komugi was no longer a hostage. And more than that, she realized, it scared her, the idea that she’d so completely lost control of her body. The loss of control now scared her, and so did the feeling of vulnerability that came with having her Nen defenses completely down. And with that fear came guilt. She was a Royal Guard. Her only thought should have been for the King’s safety. Her life was meaningless as long as he still lived. She shouldn’t have been feeling this kind of selfish fear. Even if she paid for her mistake with her life…

No… she couldn’t think that way. Regardless of her poor judgement, Pitou knew Gon was no longer a threat to the King. She’d succeeded at her mission. And she was confident that the other humans who’d attacked the palace weren’t a danger either. The selection was disrupted by the destruction of the palace, of course, and her incapacitation would delay it further. If the King decided that she had failed in her duty by letting this happen, she would gladly accept any punishment, including death. But until then, she could let herself be concerned with her own survival.

With her injuries she couldn’t afford to wait for her Nen to return on its own without getting to a safe location first. But she couldn’t walk. She _couldn’t_ get back to the palace, not without help. Help… wait, that was it! The cell phone! She could contact… who, Pouf? With his ability it would certainly be easy for him to retrieve her without compromising his ability to perform other tasks. But lately she’d had a bad feeling about Pouf, and with the way he’d nearly gotten Komugi killed during the standoff with Gon, she was no longer sure he could be trusted. He wasn’t disloyal, exactly… she was sure he’d lay down his life for the King just like her and Youpi would, but he seemed like he believed he knew better than the King what was in his best interests. And if he believed Pitou was a bad influence… in her current state, it would be easy for him to kill her and claim she’d died in the battle against Gon. She hated to admit it, but Leol was more trustworthy at the moment. She knew his personality, but thanks to Shaiapouf helping him develop his Hatsu she also knew secondhand how it it worked. Leol would jump at the chance to have Pitou in his debt in exchange for a chance to borrow any of her abilities. He should have only seen Puppeteer and Doctor Blythe, neither of which he could do too much damage with in an hour assuming he didn’t take away her access to them at a critical time. And if he proved a problem, she could always just kill him.

But when Pitou tried to fish the phone out of her pocket, her hope vanished. Fragments of glass, metal, and shattered circuit boards fell through her fingers, covered in residue from the fire that had consumed the phone’s lithium battery after it ruptured. She stared at the last piece for a while, then let it too fall. “Damn it...” she whispered. She was stranded, with no Nen, unable to move and unable to communicate.

By the time Pitou dragged herself back to the old mansion, following the trail of snapped trees and furrowed ground, the sun was setting again. It was a distance she could normally have covered in seconds. A phone… there had to be a phone there somewhere. Cell phones were banned for most citizens in East Gorteau; a place like this had to have a land line to allow staff to communicate with other government facilities. She had to find it quickly… instead of her getting used to the pain it had just gotten worse as her body became more and more exhausted. She hadn’t thrown up any more blood, but that wasn’t a sign of safety; there could be still be internal bleeding elsewhere in her body. She still felt sick, and her throat burned from dry heaving so many times. Her head was still spinning, she felt alternately hot and cold, and most worryingly she’d already passed out multiple times. She knew these were all symptoms of severe blood loss. How long did she have?

When she finally located the phone, in a side room she suspected was a butler’s pantry, Pitou was on the edge of panic. It was becoming harder and harder to stay awake. It took all her strength to pull herself up onto an end table with her good arm so she could reach the buttons and receiver. She dialed Leol’s number, having to attempt it twice due to her hand shaking. The ringback tone played four times, then went to a default voicemail message. She waited for the piercing beep.

“Leol. This is Neferpitou. I need your help immediately. I have been severely injured in a fight with one of the invaders. I am unable to walk or use Nen, and may have internal injuries which could be life-threatening if left untreated. I am in a large human residence, which can be reached from the palace as follows...”

Pitou let out a sigh as she ended the message. No one had had any contact with Leol for several days. Was he even alive? She was pretty sure his subordinates, Hina and Flutter, were, but she wasn’t positive she remembered their numbers. There was a chance, though…

Two more voicemails. And Hina had even set hers. As she listened to the bubbly voice telling her that Hina might have lost her phone so it was better to just contact Leol or Flutter, Pitou tried not to cry from frustration. She dialed every number she could think of – Pouf, Bizef, any of the guard stations at the palace – her message growing more frantic with each attempt. The numbers on the keypad blurred, and she felt herself falling, but made no movement to catch herself. There was nothing else she could do. If this was how it ended… she had already accepted death at Gon’s hands. Was this how the boy felt? Pitou wondered as her consciousness slipped away again. When his borrowed power ran out, had he stumbled away into the forest to die, knowing he never intended to survive the battle anyway? Why did she tell him the truth? Why did she wait so long? For some reason, she had imagined herself in the human’s position, and didn’t want him to die blaming himself for being unable to save his ally. For some reason, she’d felt somehow _guilty_ that her ability didn’t work, _guilty_ that she had to kill a human, an enemy. There was something about him…

Then Pitou’s thoughts were cut short. She lay still and silent again, apart from her breathing and heartbeat, and didn’t move until she was discovered the next day by the Association Hunters sent to recover Kite’s body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Every single time I rewatch the Chimera Ant Arc I’m like: “Man, Gon vs. Pitou was such a tragedy. Pitou has such a good, interesting personality and seemed to be finally learning empathy before her character development got cut short, and is so similar to Gon and Killua in some ways, and it seems like they could be friends if they’d met under different circumstances.” Then I try to find fanfics where Pitou survives, and every time I end up finding pretty much nothing, and I think “y’know, I should write something,” but then don’t because I’m busy with other stuff. Well, I finally bit the bullet and actually wrote it.  
> • Full disclosure, I’ve only seen the anime, I’m avoiding reading the manga because I don’t want to be caught in the vicious cycle of Hiatus X Hiatus. I’ve heard a little bit about what goes on, but I’m just going to treat this as diverging from canon after the final episode of the anime.  
> • I came up with the idea of Asclepius like two years ago, and I’ll admit it’s kind of an asspull, but it lets Pitou survive without losing the emotional impact of what happened on Gon and Killua. Also, from what I heard Hisoka did something very similar – giving yourself CPR with Residual Nen is obviously less extreme than regrowing your head from nothing, but Hisoka was just using bungee gum and didn’t, y’know, canonically attempt to resurrect a dead person with Nen already.  
> • I’m planning to post this on Reddit at some point, so there might be someone arguing about Pitou’s gender. First, to my knowledge it was never actually confirmed one way or the other, so I do what I want. Second, as mentioned this is anime canon, and in the anime Pitou is voiced by a woman and has more feminine proportions, so I’m gonna use she/her pronouns. A later chapter will have more explanation on the “but Chimera Ant soldiers are supposed to be male” situation.  
> • So, in the “write what you know” category, I have a mild case of emetophobia and a year or so ago a medication I was taking was causing frequent nausea as a side effect. Let me tell ya, it fucking sucked because the stress of being afraid of throwing up just makes you feel even sicker. And the ab cramps hurt, especially when you’re on an empty stomach or you’re sore for any other reason. Vomiting after the kick Gon gave Pitou would be pure torture.  
> • Smartphones get broken screens when you drop them off a table. Aura or no aura, if you get hit hard enough to fly a mile crashing through rocks and tree trunks, and it’s in your pocket, that thing ain’t coming out in one piece. Maybe Pitou should have bought a Beetle Phone like Gon? But then it wouldn’t fit in the pockets of that jacket or those shorts.  
> • The scene of Asclepius activating was inspired by the scene in Hellraiser where Frank is resurrected, as well as by the Elrics’ original human transmutation attempt in FMA.


	2. Letter x and x Phone Call

_ Dear Aunt Mito, _

_ I know I haven’t written to you in a while, but life as a Hunter has been very busy, and something kept coming up… _

 

_ Dear Aunt Mito, _

_ It’s been a long time since I came home, hasn’t it? I meant to send you a letter, but things kept coming up. Life as a Hunter hasn’t been exactly how I thought it’d be, but it has been busy, and it’s been hard to find a... _

 

_ Dear Aunt Mito, _

_ I am very, very sorry for not visiting or writing for over a year. I hope you haven’t been too worried about me. I want you to know that I’m safe, and I’ll be coming home soon. Life as a hunter is definitely busy – Killua and I spent a lot of time training with Bisky. Sorry, I guess you don’t know who Bisky is. She’s… _

 

_ Dear Aunt Mito, _

_ I just want you to now that I’m  _ ~~_ saif _ ~~ _ safe, and I’ll be coming home soon. I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, but a lot’s happened. I can’t wait to tell you about it… _

 

_ Dear  _ ~~_ Ant _ ~~ _ Mito, _

 

“Damnit!” Gon recognized his spelling mistake and crumpled up the fifth piece of paper, setting it on the bench beside him. Why did writing letters have to be so hard? He could have typed it on a computer, of course, but that felt like it would be cheating. When Gon was little, he’d made a game out of writing letters to his father, telling him about his adventures on Whale Island. They were never sent, of course, but he was pretty sure Aunt Mito still had them in a box somewhere. He’d stopped writing them a few years ago, but now that Aunt Mito was the one who was thousands of miles away, it just felt right to send her a real letter, written with a pen and paper. It was much easier back then, though: partly because he’d sent them more frequently and didn’t have to figure out where to  _ begin _ to describe a whole year’s worth of events, partly because he didn’t know for certain that they  _ would _ be read, and by someone who had been waiting for a whole year, and partly because back then, there were never things he couldn’t tell his Dad. It took several weeks after the incident with the foxbear cub, and Kite, before he wrote another letter, but he did in the end.

Now that he’d met Ging, though, it was a little different. He’d told Ging part of what happened with Kite the first time he met him, shortly after he woke up, and he knew his father probably knew more of the story from the other hunters, but when they talked up on top of the World Tree, Gon mostly told him the good stuff, things like how Knuckle always had dogs following him around, and how he’d gone on a date with Palm. It felt easier, more natural to do it that way. Ging didn’t seem like the kind of guy who liked to hear people be down on themselves.

Aunt Mito, though? He could  _ never _ tell her. Ging was a Hunter. Gon was sure he’d faced dangerous situations, and even death, many times. Aunt Mito was different. He guessed he’d told her about Hisoka, and about some people dying in the Hunter Exam, but even then there were a couple things he left out. He decided not to let her know that Killua was an assassin, for example, or that he’d killed someone in the final phase of the exam, only that his brother had tried to force him to come home and go back to the family business, and intimidated him into breaking the rules of the exam and disqualifying himself. And now? He knew he could tell her most of what happened with the Phantom Troupe, and almost all of what happened on Greed Island, although he’d decided she didn’t need to know that Genthru blew off his left hand. ‘He beat me up pretty badly’ would get the basic point across without worrying her too much.

But after they beat Greed Island, once they met Kite? What  _ could _ he tell her? He’d been informed that everything that happened with the Chimera Ants was to be kept Top Secret, that non-hunters couldn’t be allowed to know what had happened in NGL and East Gorteau. Gon didn’t think it would be that bad if he told Aunt Mito and Grandma, since he trusted them to keep it secret from anyone else. Nen was also supposed to be a secret, and he’d told them a little bit about it. He planned to tell them more at some point, but he couldn’t exactly put it in a letter in case someone read it. It didn’t matter though, because he didn’t  _ want _ to tell her even all of what he’d told Ging. People had  _ died _ . People had died during the Hunter Exam, and Kastro had died in Heaven’s Arena, and so on, but they were people who signed up for the exam, or who signed up to fight Hisoka knowing who he was, or who were members of the Mafia or Phantom Troupe, or had chosen to put their lives on the line by playing a deadly video game. But the ants had killed so many people who hadn’t done anything. He remembered the empty villages in NGL, the swarms of ants carrying away limp bodies, the town in East Gorteau where the dogs had dug up the shallow mass grave. Those were all just ordinary people like… like Aunt Mito, and Grandma, and all the other people on Whale Island. How could he tell Aunt Mito that he’d had to just keep his head down and do nothing while they all died because he was too weak?

It was close to evening when Gon finally finished the letter, sealed the envelope, and stuck it in the mailbox. It would probably take a couple of weeks to reach her, he thought. He would wait to go home until it had, so she had time to prepare. And maybe get out some of the anger at him not contacting her for more than a year. Gon sighed as he walked down the sidewalk toward the bus stop that would take him from Dridgam City, where the World Tree was, down the mountains to Gradas. He didn’t feel like taking the hike back over the pass alone. It was weird enough not having Killua around already.

He sat down on a rock at the bus stop – the bench was already full – and unwrapped a sandwich he’d gotten from a shop. It was busy, with hundreds of people milling around. He started to play his usual game of mentally counting the tourists and the locals. It was never really challenging – almost anywhere you went the locals walked faster – but here it was extra easy because the tourists were the ones wearing t-shirts and shorts. Dridgam City was already over two thousand meters above sea level, and this time of year the air was dry after passing over the mountains. Even in August it got cold at night. A local man wearing jeans and an unbuttoned windbreaker gave Gon a slightly amused look as he passed. Gon realized he looked just like a tourist the way he was dressed, and he supposed he was. But his body always produced a lot of heat, so he didn’t mind the temperature – and besides, he didn’t actually have any long pants with him.

Gon’s eyes strayed lower, to the tourists’ feet. There was an ant nest growing from a crack in the sidewalk, and hundreds of little black specks moving about – more purposely, it seemed, than half the people. Gon watched as pair after pair of shoes missed the nest. Once he would have given the insects crumbs from his sandwich. Now… he knew it was silly, that these were just ordinary ants, but he still tensed at the sight of it, and part of him wanted to walk up and kick the anthill into loose sand himself. He pulled the crumpled scraps of paper out of his pocket. ‘Ant’ Mito. He really did have ants on his brain.

Again, Gon’s thoughts turned to what he would tell Aunt Mito about what he’d been doing for the last four months. If he was honest with himself he was actually dreading coming home because of it, because he knew eventually she’d start asking questions. And then what could he say? What could he say about the empty villages and the bloodstains? What could he say about Kite telling him to kill without hesitation or remorse, or about how  _ easy _ it had been to do so when the time came? What could he say about leaving Kite to die, because he’d been paralyzed with fear by that  _ monstrous _ aura? What could he say about how easily Knuckle had beaten him even after he’d trained his heart out for a month? What could he say about Kite’s body – his dead body, he now knew, even though Kite was alive in a different body – looking like it had been cut into pieces and sewed back together like a monster from an old horror movie? What could he say about nearly losing control and hurting Morel, or even killing him? What could he say about him and Killua having to choose between risking the whole human race and letting the ants kill hundreds of thousands of regular people every day while they did nothing? What could he say about making friends with Meleoron and Ikalgo, ants who he was pretty sure had killed innocent people too, even if they didn’t do it for sport? Sure, Killua used to be similar, but Gon hadn’t told Mito about Killua’s old job either. What could he say about… about what he’d done during the palace invasion?

Gon winced, remembering Killua saying how depressed Gon’s statement about Kite being none of his business made him. It was said in a joking way, but Gon knew that his friend didn’t want them to part feeling like they’d argued or fought, but at the same time couldn’t bring himself to leave without saying anything at all. He knew underneath the smile, that Killua had been seriously hurt by that, was still hurt by it. And the scary part was, Gon didn’t know if he could even say that was the stupidest thing he’d done. Using the girl as a hostage was… well, it actually wasn’t a bad idea, and it probably stopped Shaiapouf from killing him, but he still felt a little bad about doing it since she was a victim of the Ant King just as much as any of the people they’d saved by interfering with the Selection. He’d never have actually killed her, though… at least, Gon kept telling himself that. But would he really? He might not have put a knife to her throat, but he was so close,  _ so damned close _ to letting her die by ramming his fist with a fully-charged Jajanken right into Neferpitou’s face.

Gon’s fists clenched, and a couple of people waiting for the bus gave him a funny look and shuffled away, but he ignored them. Killing that ant was the one thing he’d done right. He’d taken out his target, unlike the other two groups. He regretted what he’d done to reach that goal, but only because he’d hurt those around him. He’d hurt Killua, definitely, and probably Morel and Knuckle and Shoot and while Kite hadn’t  _ said _ anything about it when Gon apologized to him he was pretty sure he was horrified as well. And he’d hurt himself, too. Losing his arm while he was in that form didn’t hurt, but only because all the rage, and the hatred, and the sadness he felt hurt so much more.

There was a part of Gon, though, that regretted it for a different reason. He’d gained too much power, and it had ended too quickly. Pitou hadn’t responded when he’d picked it up from where it was slumped against a tree and slammed it to the ground – he was pretty sure the Ant was knocked unconscious from the first Jajanken. And part of Gon, the part that had made that suicidal vow in the first place and hadn’t completely gone away the way his Nen had, said that wasn’t enough. He hadn’t really made Pitou pay. It wasn’t just Kite. It was him, mostly, but Gon knew those charred bodies the dogs were chewing on had been killed by Pitou’s puppets, and every one of those puppets had been a person too. And after that… after all that… how  _ dare _ Pitou sit there begging for the life of one girl, and have the nerve to say she was important to it? How dare it make a mockery of those words? How dare it act like it  _ cared _ , like it was a damn human being with feelings and loved ones like all the thousands of people it had killed had been? Ikalgo and Meleoron were people, even if they were Chimera Ants – Gon supposed it was because they had human memories still. But Neferpitou wasn’t, no matter how much it tried to pretend it was. Gon knew better. He’d felt that… that  _ inhuman _ , predatory aura from it, like a thousand Hisokas, he’d seen the look in its eyes when it took Kite’s arm. He knew Pitou’s real nature. It was a monster.

No, part of Gon still wished he’d done what he’d fantasized about doing to Pitou that whole hour he watched it put the girl back together. He wanted to beat it senseless, but not to the point of unconsciousness, only to where it couldn’t defend itself. Then, he wanted to use Scissors Jajanken to cut off its arm, like it did to Kite, and then just keep cutting until its body was nothing but a mass of slash wounds, just like Kite’s was, and only then smash its head in.

Pitou deserved everything he’d done to it and more. Gon knew that. So why did the memory, hazy like a fragment of an old dream, of himself kneeling over the ant’s limp body and smashing its already broken face over and over until its skull finally gave way, and feeling the blue blood running between his fingers, keep returning to his mind? It wasn’t that often, but in moments when he wasn’t thinking about anything else, it would come back – more often since he’d come down from the World Tree that morning, and was truly alone with his thoughts. And why did the memory make him feel so… wrong? He’d done just what Kite told him to – killed the enemy, and crushed the head to make sure it was really dead, and even then it hadn’t been enough. His last memory before waking up in the hospital was Pitou’s headless corpse still struggling against him as he threw everything he had into one final attack, and Killua’s voice screaming his name, begging him to stop.

Killua. Gon found his hand straying to his pocket and pulling out the old beetle phone. Should he call him? He’d meant to wait a few days, maybe a week, and let Killua just spend time with his sister – or sisters – for a while. Unless Killua called him first, of course. But Killua was an assassin. Gon never really asked him about it, but he knew he’d killed people, probably a lot of people, before they met. Did he feel like this about any of the enemies he’d killed? Did Kurapika feel like this about Uvogin, the Phantom Troupe member he’d killed? Gon supposed he could try asking Kurapika, but according to Leorio he hadn’t responded to anything – calls, texts, or e-mails – for months and not even shown up at the Election. He opened the phone, his finger hovering over the button to access his contacts list… should he call Killua? Maybe he should wait until that night, once he got to Gradas, or maybe he should just send an e-mail asking if they could talk. He didn’t want the whole thing to be over e-mail, talking about something like this in writing felt weird.

The phone rang. It hadn’t crossed Gon’s mind that it could ring right at that moment, and he yelped in surprise at the sudden sound, nearly dropping it. There were more funny looks from the people on the bench.

“Hello?” Gon answered it. The number wasn’t anyone on his contacts list, so he wasn’t sure if he wanted the caller to know who he was. For all he knew it could have been Hisoka challenging him to a fight.

“Gon. This is Morel,” a familiar deep voice said. Gon breathed a sigh of relief. Morel must have been calling from a pay phone, or gotten a new one. Or maybe he’d gotten one he could throw away to use on the Chimera Ant Extermination mission, and this was his regular number. “Is Killua there?”

“Huh? No, sorry, we split up yesterday. Why, is he not picking up? Or do you need his number?”

“No. I’ll call him. We have… a serious problem. And I think it’s better that you both hear about it at the same time.”

Gon’s heart rate nearly doubled. “A problem? What’s wrong? Is it something with his family? Or… did something bad happen to Leorio? Or Kurapika? Or Knuckle, or -”

“No! Don’t worry, it’s not like that! Everyone you might be thinking of is completely fine. Wait a minute while I get Killua on the other line.”

“Okay.” Gon shoved the last couple bites of his sandwich in his mouth as he listened to the faint sound of buttons being pressed on a touchscreen, then got up to throw the paper it came in into a nearby recycling bin.

“Hey. The call’s merged now, right? Gon, long time no see, huh?” Killua’s voice sounded cheerful and unperturbed, but there was a lot of background noise, including what sounded like music.

“Killua!” Gon practically squealed like a puppy whose owners had just returned home.

“Miss me already, huh?”

“Uhh… a little bit.” Gon felt his face heat up. “Actually, I was wondering… there’s something I wanted to ask you about-” he was interrupted by Morel clearing his throat. “uh, later.”

“Sure,” said Killua. “I’ll call tonight once we’re in a hotel. Hang on a sec, Morel. Alluka, I’ve gotta step outside for a minute. It’s Morel, the Hunter – he was one of the guys helping stand guard at the hospital. He’s got something to tell me and it sounds like it’s important. I’ll be right back – if the waiter comes, can you order a cola for me?”

“Okay, big brother!” Alluka’s voice was more muffled.

There was the sound of footsteps, and then a door swinging open with a faint chime. “So, what’s the bad news, old man?” Killua asked.

“Well… you’re familiar with the situation in East Gorteau, right? International aid workers have moved in, and a group of Hunters is leading a task force to capture any remaining rogue Chimera Ants and quarantine the citizens who were transformed?”

Gon nodded, even though Morel couldn’t see him over the phone. “Yeah, I think so. The ones like Palm, right? Who were in those eggs on the trees?”

“Yeah… those. Anyway...” Morel took a deep breath, something which took quite a while due to his extraordinary lung capacity, then breathed most of it back out. “...they found Neferpitou.  _ Alive. _ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • And, yeah… here’s what Gon’s been up to.  
>  • “Dridgam City” and “Gradas” are anagrams of “Midgard” and “Asgard,” two of the worlds in Norse Mythology. It seemed to fit since the World Tree may have been inspired by Yggdrasil.  
>  • It’s important to note, me writing Gon as dehumanizing Pitou to this extent is NOT me saying he’s a bad person. Quite the opposite: I still believe Gon is fundamentally a good, kind, caring person. He’s still the same kid who healed Genthru. Dehumanization, and blocking out and rationalizing away the caring behavior he saw from Pitou, is a defense mechanism to stop him from feeling guilty over killing her, and was necessary for his will to be singleminded enough to pull off his transformation. But his subconscious still isn’t totally convinced.  
>  • If you don’t count the letter drafts, Gon and Pitou’s first lines in this story are both “Damn it.” The funny thing is this wasn’t intentional; I didn’t notice it until after I’d already written both these chapters.


	3. Third Encounter x And x Second Chance

“What?” Gon whispered, more to himself than to Killua or Morel. “What?!” he repeated, screaming into the phone at the top of his lungs. “That’s impossible!” Multiple people at the bus stop flinched, and an old woman put her hands over her ears and glared. But this didn’t even register to Gon.

“It certainly seems that way,” said Morel. “I just need you both to stay calm, and think carefully. Is there any possible way Pitou could have -”

“No!” Gon interrupted him. “I killed it! I remember my fist going straight through its skull!” Then a thought occurred to him. “Although… that memory’s kind of hazy, like something out of a dream. I guess it’s possible that I imagined it when I was out after the fight...”

“No, I can confirm that,” said Killua. “Morel, Gon completely destroyed Pitou’s head – her skull was smashed into hundreds of pieces. Even for a Chimera Ant, surviving that’s completely impossible.”

“That eliminates any easy explanation, then...” Morel sighed. “You didn’t give details when you brought Gon back before, so I just had to confirm.”

“Hang on a sec. Morel, when you say ‘alive,’ do you mean  _ alive _ , or do you mean mobile? Pitou had some sort of Nen ability like the one that turned people into puppets, that activated after death and caused her corpse to attack Gon. It stopped moving after his last attack, but I didn’t stick around to make sure – my main focus was getting Gon medical attention as quickly as possible. If it remained active it’s possible it was still able to move and that’s what the hunters saw.”

“No… the people recovering Kite’s body found her unconscious in the same building. They didn’t report any Nen ability being active, and she definitely wasn’t a headless corpse.”

“So… did they finish it off?” Gon asked. He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. If it was a yes, then even if the damage he’d caused made that possible, he still felt like he’d failed. If it was a no, then he’d  _ really _ failed, and Pitou was alive, but there might have been some chance of fixing his mistake.

“No. Not all of the people involved are Pros, so they were only given information the Association believed was absolutely necessary for their mission. Only a few of them had descriptions of the King and Royal Guards, and from what I was told they assumed Pitou was a human who was transformed and somehow got out there, and for the last three weeks she was comatose so that was all they had to go on. They only discovered her identity today when she woke up.”

For a long time, Gon was silent, and there was silence from the other end of the line as well. The bus came and went, and the stop emptied, but he stayed rooted where he stood, his hands shaking as he gripped the phone.

“How… how bad is it?” Gon finally asked. 

“You mean, what’s the death toll so far?” asked Killua.

“Yeah…”

“So far, zero,” said Morel. “There aren’t enough powerful Nen users to serve as wardens, and there’s a risk of anyone transformed displaying dangerous new abilities, so the captured ants have been kept on a cocktail of drugs that both keeps them in a state of Zetsu and reduces their natural muscular strength.”

“That might not be enough!” said Killua. “One of the Officer-level soldiers took Gon’s Jajanken and survived, before the ants knew how to use Nen! Even with Zetsu and reduced strength, the Royal Guard would still be incredibly strong!”

“As far as I know, Pitou has shown no signs of attempting to escape,” Morel replied. “According to the phone call I got, she figured out fairly quickly what being taken captive by humans meant, and became despondent when she learned about the King’s death. But we’re still concerned. Knov and I were considering returning to West Gorteau to neutralize her if necessary, since our abilities can easily counter an opponent with no Nen. However, based on your account we’ll have to evaluate our options more carefully. The other two Royal Guards both had some form of shapeshifting ability which could have let them survive extreme physical damage. If Pitou has an ability like this that we didn’t know about, possibly even a biological one, we’d need to tread much more carefully.”

“You think Pitou’s part starfish or something?” Killua asked. “I’ve heard of animals that can regrow limbs and tails before, but not heads.”

“Hydras can regrow heads they lose!” said Gon. “But they still die if they lose all of them. I know some earthworms can grow back the entire front half of their bodies, though.”

“Do worms even have brains?”

“Uhh… maybe?”

“Anyway, I just thought you two deserved to know.” Morel sounded like he was about to hang up, but Gon interrupted him.

“Wait!”

“Hmm?”

Gon took a deep breath. He still couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t possibly be true. The memory played in his head again. One Ko-enhanced punch after another, like the rhythm of a large ship’s bell. The flying blood, and the crunch of bone splintering under his fist. The feeling of the horrible aura he thought he’d extinguished boring into his back, and then not the pain, but the numbing  _ absence _ of his arm. The headless body twitching in his grip like something out of a horror movie. Killua’s scream. The memory was so fuzzy, but it still felt so real. And Killua had confirmed it. It really happened. How could Pitou still be alive? Then Gon said two words that would change his life. “I’ll go.”

“Go? What, to West Gorteau?” replied Morel. “Gon, that’s suicidal. If Pitou manages to escape and recover her Nen-”

“If that happens it’s suicide for you too,” said Gon. “If it doesn’t, then like you said, there are ways of beating just strength.”

“But you can’t use Nen either! Like Killua said, even officer and squadron leader level soldier ants without Nen were a serious threat to skilled Nen users! You’d be putting yourself at huge risk! And for what?”

“I created this mess,” Gon muttered. “I don’t know what I did wrong, but somehow I screwed up, and I want to find out  _ why _ . Besides, if nothing goes wrong, then it doesn’t affect you, does it, Morel?” He didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking.  _ And if something does go wrong, and other people die because of my mistake but I don’t, I won’t be able to live with myself. _ “...It was a complete waste, wasn’t it? Kite’s still alive, and I didn’t even kill that ant, and then everyone was worried about me all that time for nothing...”

“Gon...” Killua’s voice was almost pleading. “I have a sister to keep safe now. I can’t take Alluka anywhere near that monster!”

“I know you can’t! I’m not asking you to come with me!” Gon winced as soon as the words left his mouth. That came out wrong.  _ You have it easy, Killua. Since it means nothing to you,  _ he remembered himself saying. He was such a damned idiot! “Wh – what I mean is, I keep being selfish, and dragging you into things, and you don’t have to do that! I can’t ask you to put Alluka in danger like that! Like you said, I’m in second place!”

“Gon… you know I was joking when I said that, right?”

“Uhh… yeah! Yeah, of course I knew that!” Gon faked a laugh. What could he do, tell Killua that he’d believed, somewhere deep down, that it made perfect sense that Killua wouldn’t want to be friends with him after what he’d said?

“Right...” Killua’s voice gave the impression that he didn’t buy the lie at all. “Look, I can’t put Alluka in danger, but I can’t let you face Pitou alone! Not again… Gon, please don’t make me choose between my sister and my best friend, because I can’t do it! I just can’t!”

“Killua… I just...” Gon sighed, and held the phone a bit farther from himself. This was stupid. He knew it was a bad idea, so why was he so set on going? What was he even hoping to accomplish? “There’s a good chance nothing will even happen, right? And in the worst-case scenario, it wouldn’t matter if you went with me...”

“The worst-case scenario is that Pitou escapes, evades capture long enough for the drugs to wear off, and turns out to have some innate ability similar to Shaiapouf’s that makes her impossible to kill with blunt force. Given her loyalty to the King, it’s possible that she would try to take revenge on those responsible for his death. Which is everyone who was on the mission… no, wait, I don’t think she encountered Morel, Shoot, or Knov directly, or saw most of the others fight, so her priority targets are probably me, you, Gramps...” Killua trailed off. There was the faint noise of traffic from the phone, but Gon could swear he heard Killua’s eyes get wider. “Crap. The name Zoldyck’s famous enough we’d be easy to track down… I mean, you and Leorio and Kurapika found our house pretty easily...”

There was a long silence, to the point of being uncomfortable. Gon heard the squeak of a chair adjusting on Morel’s end of the line. “Killua? Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m there. Where are you headed next?”

“Gradas.”

“Get three tickets to West Gorteau. We’ll meet you at the airport tomorrow night.”

“Wait! You don’t have to! You’re right, I shouldn’t keep putting you in a position of having to worry about me! I’m not going!”

“No, you were right, Gon,” said Killua. “Defeating Pitou was both of our assignment. We both failed. And right now, Alluka’s in danger whether I try to run from the mistake or not. And, if it is the worst-case scenario, with Godspeed I can keep up with Pitou if she can’t use Nen, and my electricity can destroy every cell in her body so it doesn’t matter what ability she has. But if I’m not in a position where I can take her out before she gets it back, I’m screwed. So the safest thing to do, for everyone, is for me to go with you. Just… you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything!”

“Don’t try to fight Pitou again. No matter what happens.”

 

Two days later, Gon took a deep breath as he followed the doctor down the hallway of the psychiatric ward. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the place – cleaning chemicals, rubbing alcohol and iodine, latex and plastic, and the general odor of sickness – and looked back at his companions. The night after the phone call with Morel, Gon and Killua had told some of their other friends, some of whom had volunteered – or to be more accurate,  _ insisted _ on coming. Knuckle was there as backup, Leorio and Ikalgo purely as moral support. Ikalgo had gotten on swimmingly with Alluka, and much to Killua’s relief ended up volunteering to show her around the city at a safe distance, saying Pitou gave him the willies anyway. As a result there were four of them now.

“Okay, let’s review the plan!” Knuckle said in his usual outdoor-appropriate voice. “If that ant starts anything funny, you fry her and I’ll hit her with Chapter 7 Bankruptcy!” Knuckle had previously explained that APR, if applied to a target who was already unable to use Nen and as a result had little or no aura in their body, would become IRS immediately.

“Got it,” Killua said flatly. “And Gon, what will you do?”

“Nothing. Or – no, I’ll run away as fast as possible!”

“And I’ll slug you and knock you out if you try to be a hero again!” added Leorio.

Most of West Gorteau’s medical facilities, and even those in the neighboring Hass Republic and Rokario Republic, were currently packed with refugees from the East. In the cramped, crowded conditions of the mass march to Peijing, with the added fatigue of walking for days on end and psychological stress, disease had spread like fire along a trail of gunpowder. But many of the country’s prison hospitals and psychiatric wards were currently blocked off, accessible only by licensed Hunters and a few other authorized personnel, to house the five thousand converted citizens and any captured Chimera Ants whose threat level was unclear.

The last two doors on the left were both made of solid steel, with tiny shuttered windows. The doctor, a middle-aged balding man with a sour expression, slid the shutter on the next-to-last door up, peered through, and shut it again. “Well… she’s awake, at least...” he said. “I admire your caution, but I’d be surprised if you could do much to her. A lot of these ants have tough carapaces, but this one they had to jury-rig a shotgun shell with a center punch just to make a hole in her skin for an IV because the needles kept bending even with Nen users trying to jam them in.”

“Don’t worry, we’re professionals,” said Killua.

The doctor inserted a key into the massive padlock on the door and turned it counterclockwise five times. There was the sound of some sort of mechanism ratcheting and clicking.

“Impressive cell...” commented Leorio.

The door slowly began to swing open with an ominous creak. Gon took another breath and braced himself as he stepped through, ready to be assaulted by the same aura that in his mind was now synonymous with terror and loss. He was ready to turn the corner to see the same monster he’d helplessly watched tear Kite’s arm off, the same monster he’d convinced himself he’d seen in the palace, the same monster whose headless corpse had gotten back up and taken his arm off out of what Gon had convinced himself after the fact was bloodlust. But that Neferpitou didn’t exist anymore.

The aura was gone. But the identity of the creature in the steel-framed hospital bed was unmistakeable. The face, and the strange eyes which seemed to be both red and yellow depending on the angle, had burned themselves into Gon’s memory. His fists involuntarily clenched as he remembered the look of utterly inhuman malice the ant had given him months earlier. But it was also impossible to miss Pitou’s slight flinch, and the way the eyes fixed on him and widened in fear. The expression was only there for a moment before it was replaced with a blank stare, but Gon realized it was the same expression he’d seen in the Palace, and as he lead Pitou out of the mansion. At first, he’d rationalized it as Pitou fearing punishment from the King if the girl died. Then, later, he realized the ant really was on some level afraid of him as well.  _ Good _ , he’d thought. He’d scared Genthru too. He didn’t enjoy seeing the fear on his opponents’ faces the way Genthru must have to have even created his abilities. With Genthru he’d felt a certain vindictive satisfaction at giving the bomber a taste of his own medicine. With Pitou, fear wasn’t enough. He’d wanted it to  _ suffer _ for what it had done. Now, though, the ant’s reaction made him feel like something inside him was pulling in two directions at once. Fear wasn’t an emotion a monster like Pitou should be allowed to have, not after what it had done. Gon should have been infuriated by it. But he couldn’t make himself feel that way.

Killua’s mind had not been clouded by rage when he encountered Pitou in the palace. He had recognized the genuineness of the ant’s fear for Komugi. It was the same as his fear for Gon… most of the last several weeks, really. Even if Pitou only cared for Komugi because of her effect on the King, it was clear that she genuinely cared for him. Killua already understood that Pitou wasn’t the monster he’d believed, but after seeing with his own eyes the monster grief had turned his best friend into, he was prepared for Pitou to react to the sight of them with rage. He recognized the fear, even before Gon did, but what truly caught him off guard was the hollow stare that followed. That was an expression he’d seen on Gon many times the night of the battle.

Pitou was the first to break the silence. “You’re alive?” she asked. Then any hint of surprise faded from her voice, and her next words were quiet and monotonous, like a shy child reading lines from a script in a school play. “Are you here to kill me?”

“I don’t know...” Gon found his own voice taking on a similar quality. He stepped further into the room, allowing Killua, Leorio, and Knuckle in behind him. “I don’t know… it depends...”

“Why didn’t you kill me before?” Pitou’s eyes locked onto Gon’s. Even without the aura, the same intensity was there. But this still wasn’t the same creature that had killed Kite. This was the creature that had begged Gon for Komugi’s life, and broken her own arm, and offered to let him break any part of her body he wanted. “You knew… you knew the King was already dead, didn’t you? So why did you leave me alive? Why did you leave me alive knowing I’d failed to protect him and my life was worthless?” Pitou’s voice was almost a shout now. She leaned forward and thrust her right arm out at him. The steel cable chaining her right wrist to the bed’s frame creaked ominously, and the frame’s metal pipe bent, but they held.  


“Gon, get back!” Killua hissed. He stepped forward, a spark of electricity dancing between his fingertips.

But Gon stood his ground. “What are you talking about? I  _ did _ kill you!” Pitou’s eyes widened in surprise. “Damn the King… you were the one I wanted!” he continued through gritted teeth. “I nearly gave up everything to kill you… Why the hell would I let you live?!”

“Gon.” Killua stepped back again, and placed his hand on Gon’s shoulder. “Calm down. Remember why you wanted to come here?”

Gon suppressed the urge to push Killua’s hand away. No. He wasn’t doing that again, not ever. He took another deep breath and slowly let it out through his nose. “Thanks, Killua,” he said. “I  _ did _ kill you,” he repeated more quietly. “I thought I did, at least. The only reason I’m here is because I want to know why the hell you’re still alive.”

“No… you’re right...” Pitou’s energy vanished again. “I know what you must have done to gain that power. I knew you were giving up your life, or at least your ability to use Nen. Until now, I assumed the reason I was alive was because you paid the price for that power before you could finish me off.”

“What?” Gon and Killua said in unison, and looked at each other. Without saying a word, Gon knew his friend was thinking the same thing he was. That made no sense.

“The people who found you said you were inside the mansion,” said Killua. “Can you describe what happened from when you and Gon started fighting to when you got there?”

Pitou nodded. It wasn’t long into her account before Gon and Killua exchanged another look of shock and confusion. “That’s impossible!” Killua whispered.

“Do you have any… any ability that would let you regenerate destroyed body parts?” Gon asked.

Pitou shook her head. “If I had such an ability, I wouldn’t have needed to use Doctor Blythe to heal my arm.” She looked down at her left arm. Instead of being restrained by a cable, it was in a sling and a cast not too different from what Gon remembered wearing after his first fight with Gido at Heaven’s Arena. And after his fight with Hanzo.

“About that… it doesn’t  _ look _ healed,” Gon said. Why was he even asking about the stupid arm? Now that his attention was drawn to it, he couldn’t help wincing, remembering how much it hurt the times he’d broken his arm. Why? Who cared?

“It wasn’t healed completely,” explained Pitou. “It broke again at some point during the fight.”

There it was again, a twinge not just of sympathy, but of guilt. Gon angrily stuffed it back down inside his mind. There was nothing to feel guilty about! He’d smashed the ant’s head in! It wasn’t even supposed to be alive! And he’d done the right thing! Why should he care about something stupid like a broken arm? “That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “But nothing else about this makes any sense! I killed you! I know I did! Even after you stopped moving I kept hitting you over and over until your head broke open and there wasn’t anything left of it!” Gon broke eye contact with Pitou, staring at his right hand again and remembering the sticky blood and pulverized brain matter running between his fingers. He felt a little sick.

“Jeez… that’s brutal...” Leorio muttered, looking at Gon sympathetically.

Killua took over, describing how Terpsichora had taken over, controlling Pitou’s corpse just like any of the other puppets she’d made, and how with the last of his power Gon had finally stilled it.

“That’s not… that shouldn’t be possible...” Pitou whispered. “That ability shouldn’t have even been able to do that… And you’re right… that would have been impossible to survive. Your description can’t possibly be accurate… unless...”

“Unless?” Gon asked.

Pitou hunched over, her hair obscuring her face. “I tried to develop another ability before Puppeteer – one that could actually return the dead to life. Asclepius. It never worked before – I tried to bring back your friend with it, before – and I didn’t know why, so I thought it was just impossible. But if it is – and if Terpsichora could remain active… it’s possible that Asclepius could have activated as well.” She paused. “But why on me?” she asked, looking up again. Her eyes were watering, and a tear started to run down her cheek. “Why did it bring me back, and not the King? No, it couldn’t have brought him back after, not with the condition I set, but it could have healed him!” Her voice broke. Tears were dripping onto the thin green blanket that covered her legs now. It could have saved him and Komugi! So why did it save me instead? My life isn’t worth anything… especially not now… it was because I was selfish they’re dead… it’s my fault...”

Gon stood rooted to the spot. One by one, all the mental barriers fell away, and all the things he’d seen, but refused to accept, that night three weeks ago came rushing back into his mind. This wasn’t the monster he’d come to the palace to slay. He wasn’t sure anymore if it had ever existed outside his head. It was – no, she was – at least he thought she was the right word, since Pitou had the voice of a young woman – was human, just as human as Ikalgo and Meleoron. She hadn’t been faking that concern to manipulate his emotions, it was real. This was real. Gon wasn’t infuriated by the display of humanity anymore. All he felt was guilt, looking at Pitou’s tear-stained face, and remembering it as he’d last seen it: the jaw smashed, the eyes staring glazed and unseeing in the wrong directions from broken sockets. He’d done that…

It was still surreal seeing Pitou without her aura. She looked so much smaller without it, and so completely vulnerable. She was wearing a regular hospital gown, the same ugly pastel green that seemed to always be used to label mint-flavored food. Gon had sort of assumed the dark double-breasted jacket was part of her, the same way Meleoron’s hooded tracksuit seemed to be part of him. Her hair was disheveled and went off in strings, the same way it had looked as he walked up to her slumped against the tree. Everything about her should have been in the uncanny valley: the plates on her knee joints that made them look like a doll’s - now covered by the blanket - the hands with only four fingers, too thick and ending in claws, the eyes, slightly too big and too far apart, with slit pupils and irises that you couldn’t quite tell the real color of. Even the bruises and the dark bags under her eyes and the skin – inflamed from rubbing away tears before, he now realized – were wrong; they were much too vividly blue, like sloppily applied eyeshadow, a reminder of the ants’ alien blood. But now, all he could see was a person overcome by grief. Like he’d been...

“You… you really cared about the King, didn’t you?” Gon asked. Now his voice was the one that was a drained monotone. “You loved him...”

Pitou didn’t say anything.

“I know you probably blame us for his death.” Gon tried to keep his voice level. “And you’re right to.”

“No… it was my fault...” Pitou choked out. “You were the enemy… I was supposed to protect him from you, and I failed...” She looked around the room, at Killua, Gon, Leorio, and Knuckle. “Please… just kill me… Gon’s right. I shouldn’t even be alive right now.”

“Shut up, fool!” Knuckles shouted. Gon flinched, and looked at his companion for the first time in a while. Knuckle was wiping his eyes and his running nose on his sleeve, and there were dark spots on his shoes. He dramatically jabbed his finger at Pitou. “Don’t let me catch you talking that way about yourself, or I’ll kick your ass! This idiot over here -” he jabbed his finger at Gon, “Was acting like that for months, and I didn’t stop him! And you know how he ended up? A damn raisin, that’s how!” Killua and Leorio both looked like they were simultaneously choking and being punched in the solar plexus. But Knuckle hadn’t finished. “You laid your life on the line for a friend, and that deserves respect in my book! So what if you were weak? When you lose something you care about because you were weak, you get back up and get stronger so it doesn’t happen again!”

“Thats right!” Leorio added from the other side of the room. “That’s why I became a Hunter, and it’s why I’m becoming a doctor. My best friend died when I was a kid because I couldn’t afford the operation to save him, and I’m gonna make sure that other kids don’t go through that. But don’t ever call yourself worthless. You don’t know what you’re doing to the people that care about you!” Leorio, unlike Knuckle, had a handkerchief available to blow his nose.

Killua shot him a glare. “Uhh, Leorio? Some of that might not be applicable? Especially the last bit?”

“Is this… is this what all humans are like?” Pitou sniffed.

Gon nodded. “Pretty much.”

“...Nyow I understand.” she looked like the life had been sucked out of her again. “I… I can’t be angry at you for what you did… any of you… you were all fighting for the same reasons as us, weren’t you? To protect those you cared about?”

“Yeah.”

“I just wish… I just wish I could have learned that sooner, and that the King could have… he was changing so much, just from knowing Komugi… If he’d known, maybe… maybe he’d have chosen differently...”

“I think he did know, at the end,” said Knuckle. “It was too late, but… did they tell you how he died?”

“They told me he and Komugi and Pouf and Youpi were all poisoned by your Miniature Rose, but not much else.”

“He and Komugi were both playing Gungi together… right up to the end.” Knuckle wiped his eyes again. “You know, before she died, the Queen told some of us his name.”

“His name?” Pitou’s ears twitched. “He asked us what his name was at one point.”

“It was Meruem,” said Knuckle. “The light that illuminates all, was what the Queen said.”

“Meruem...” Pitou repeated. She teared up again. “I think he’d have liked that name...”

“I think he did.”

For a while, the room was silent except for the faint buzz and hum of machinery, and the slow rhythm of five sets of breaths. Eventually Pitou turned to Gon again. “Is this how you felt, losing Kite?” she asked.

“Yes...”

“I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. Believe me, if I could have brought him back, I would have. I tried… I couldn’t wish this on anyone… it hurts too much!...”

Gon took a deep breath. His fists still clenched, he stepped forward. In the corner of his eye he saw Killua move to stop him. “It’s okay, Killua,” he said. “Pitou… I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for what you did… but I can’t hate you anymore! It’s… it’s just stupid! It hurt too many people, and I...”

He never finished his sentence. The last of the barriers broke, and his eyes, the last pair in the room to be dry, finally filled with tears. He kept moving forward until he was on the thin mattress, kneeling in front of the creature that just a few weeks ago he’d been willing to give everything he had to kill, and to make suffer, and now it hurt him to see in pain. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “Besides… Kite’s alive now… somehow...” he managed to say between sobs. “So… there’s no reason to fight anymore!” Then all either of them could do for a long time was cry in each other’s arms like little kids after a movie where the dog died at the end. Gon was conscious of Killua joining the embrace at some point, and he pulled him closer as well.

“So… now what are you gonna do?” Leorio asked a long time later, when the tears had finally stopped flowing. “Pitou seems pretty trustworthy to me, but I guess I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about since I wasn’t there. I should’ve been there to support you guys, but I wasn’t, so… this time I’m behind you all the way.”

“Huh?” said Gon.

“What I’m asking is whether this Ant’s still a threat to humanity or not. Gon, Killua. It’s your call. I’ve got an in with the Chairwoman, and whatever your decision is I’ll do everything I can to make sure Miss Cheadle accepts it.”

Gon slowly got to his feet. “So what you’re saying is… it’s our call whether Pitou lives or dies, right?” He glanced back at the chimera ant.

“Uhh… yeah, I guess, basically.” Leorio started to tug nervously at his tie.

“I… I...”

“Idiot...” Killua said without looking at Leorio. “Did they suck your brain out that fast in medical school? After what you just saw, do you really think anything would make Gon say no? He’s not going to think about logic or risks, he’s just going to decide based on his emotions.”

Leorio scowled at no one in particular. “Yeah… you’re right.”

Killua sighed, and also got up from where he was seated at the end of the bed. “I don’t know. Just based on risk… it’s incredibly dangerous. If I’m wrong, and Pitou tries to take revenge on humanity… I don’t think she could wipe out whole countries on her own, but cities? Yeah, easily. But… I don’t think that’ll actually happen.”

“I refuse to make that decision,” Gon said calmly. “I… I don’t have the right to decide whether someone deserves to live or die. But I do believe Pitou’s telling the truth.” He turned to her again. “It should be your choice. If you really believe that your life is meaningless and you can’t go on living without the King, then...” his voice caught in his throat. “After what I did I’d be a hypocrite if I tried to stop you. But… well, like Leorio said, all giving up on staying alive does is hurt the people who care about you. And I guess everyone who could have… Meruem and Pouf and Youpi… are gone now. And… even if we had to to protect what we cared about, that doesn’t change that we’re the ones who took them away from you. And… I feel like… I don’t know if you came back, or if you survived, or what, but I feel like it happened for a reason, like the world was saying you don’t deserve to die, and when I killed you I did the wrong thing!” Gon felt tears well up in his eyes again. This time he wiped them away with his sleeve. “So if you want to keep living, I’ll be that person!”

Even though Gon hadn’t worded things clearly, everyone in the room knew what he meant. Pitou was momentarily stunned. It had never crossed her mind that another being could care about her the way she cared about Meruem. She’d felt a sort of kinship and camaraderie with the other two Royal Guards, but the King was the center of their world. She would protect them against attack if necessary, but only because the loss of any of them would reduce the King’s protection and make his goals harder to accomplish, and she knew Pouf and Youpi felt the same way. And the King himself? Why would he? Her purpose was to serve him! Her life didn’t matter. But for some inexplicable reason, the idea that this might  _ not _ be true was somehow comforting. So too was the strange feeling she’d had when the two humans had wrapped their arms around her. These new emotions were completely foreign to her ant instincts, but not to her human or feline ones.

Perhaps it was inevitable. So many humans had contributed to the genetic makeup of Neferpitou, Shaiapouf, and Meruem that no single human soul could fix itself to their growing embryos. Most of the squadron leaders and many officers were, in essence, humans reborn into new bodies and remembered their old lives, but the King and Royal Guards were entirely new organisms. But their genes still played a role in shaping their personalities. Most of the nonhuman DNA donors to the chimera ants had been wild animals. When the ants attacked villages, acquiring humans was their focus, and the dogs and livestock seemed to only be good as a food source for the soldiers, being slower, weaker, and less intelligent than their wild counterparts. But one night, as a soldier was about to grab a young human that was huddled paralyzed by fear in the corner of a hut, a silver-furred tabby cat jumped in front of her, hissing and yowling. Unperturbed, the soldier approached, and the cat sunk its claws into him, digging into the gaps in his armor and going for his eyes. Ultimately it was no threat, and its attempt to protect the human was futile, but the soldier was intrigued by the species, and in addition to the human he collected several more cats on that raid. A few weeks later, Neferpitou was born with the DNA of both humans and a creature that was the result of thousands of years of selective breeding to associate humans with safety. So perhaps it was inevitable that, with tears returning to her eyes again, Pitou accepted Gon’s offer.

Killua put his arm over Gon’s shoulder. He was having trouble keeping the tears back too, but he was smiling. “Gon… I’m so glad… I’m so glad I’ve got the real you back. And Pitou? I’m not sure how often I’ll be around, since I’ve got a sister to take care of, but for what it’s worth I’ll be your friend too. And… well, it actually seems like you did a pretty good job with the King. Part of being a good friend is knowing that sometimes even if you can’t stand the idea of losing each other you’ve got to take risks together to protect what’s really important. At the same time though...” he grinned mischievously. “I’m glad there’s someone to keep Gon from doing dumb stuff when I’m not around now!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • I’m aware that the line is apparently supposed to be: “Since it doesn’t concern you / since it’s none of your business,” and it’s Gon saying that he’s the one who has the connection to Kite and not Killua. To be honest though, I actually like the mistranslation because it’s just so goddamn believable for Gon to mean to say that, but misspeak because of the horribly stressful situation he’s in.  
>  • Killua has not fully gotten over his tendency to assume the worst-case scenario. Without Illumi’s needle it doesn’t cripple him and stop him from taking necessary risks, but he still prepares the worst. In this case, ironically, it helped him.  
>  • JESUS. I know I write a lot of goddamn hurt/comfort fics, but with this one I have truly transcended trash status. Fuggoff. I needed some emotional closure from this hellish arc.  
>  • Hunter X Hunter has deconstructed a lot of common Shonen tropes, but it’s also shown many of them in a new light. One that hasn’t been covered is the “hero redeems a defeated enemy and makes friends with them” trope. So I had to do this, because the Gon vs. Pitou fight was the first I ever saw of this anime but it cut it off just before Killua reaches them, and naturally I thought it was over, so watching the CA arc the entire time I was going “NO NO NO NO NO DON’T DO IT YOU IDIOTS” despite knowing the fight was going to happen, but right up until the end I was still holding out some hope that Gon’s transformation would run out of power before Gon could finish Pitou off, or Killua would stop him from taking the final step. So I guess this is my take on a Hunter X Hunter redemption arc, and as is fitting for this series it’s ended up breaking from the norm because the protagonist is being redeemed as much as the antagonist and really they’re just two messed up characters who really need each other to get over the guilt and trauma of their earlier conflict. And so does Killua, but he’s not the one who slipped into darkness that arc.  
>  • And so, welcome to the Precious Cinnamon Roll Convention.  
>  • Knuckle, being Knuckle, gave up on trying to see Pitou as an enemy after about thirty seconds.  
>  • I wasn’t really thinking much about Pitou’s origins, but then I realized that there were only like three Chimera Ants based off domestic animals: Yunju (part horse), that one pig ant that turned people into meatballs, and Pitou. And then I realized that those crazy videos of cats taking on humans or dogs many times their size to protect their owners are basically Pitou in a nutshell.


	4. Decision x and x Freedom

“What the hell do you mean, no?!” Leorio shouted into the phone. He had commandeered the swivel chair by the far wall of the room and was straddling it backwards, with Gon’s cell phone in one hand – his own phone wouldn’t get any signal in the reinforced concrete cell – and a stack of folders in the other.

“Leorio, you are aware of what you’re asking me to do, right?” Cheadle’s voice said – Leorio had put the call on speaker. “You’re asking me to release a creature the Chairman wasn’t confident in his ability to beat in head-to-head combat into the custody of a thirteen-year-old boy who can no longer use Nen.”

“Oh yeah? Well, whose custody were you planning on releasing her into? Like you said, even Netero didn’t think he could win!”

Cheadle’s voice remained level. “You’re not helping your case here. To be honest I’m not fully convinced that keeping Neferpitou alive at all is a wise decision.”

Gon’s muscles tensed. Really? Cheadle was saying that when Pitou was right there in the same room? Right… Leorio hadn’t exactly mentioned that. Gon’s eyes went to Pitou’s face. She looked worried, but not exactly surprised. Killua, too, looked like he’d been expecting this kind of response. Then again, their initial thoughts when Morel called hadn’t been much different.

“She basically surrendered, didn’t she? You trusted the other ants – Ikalgo, Meleoron...”

“Colt!” Knuckle suggested.

“Colt!” repeated Leorio, “- enough to let them go, why not her?”

“While I wasn’t a party to that decision, I’d say the Chairman and his associates determined that the priority was stopping the far greater threat posed by the King and the Royal Guard. And the three you mentioned all cooperated with or actively assisted the Extermination Team’s efforts. I’d further note that there are numerous Nen users capable of dealing with ants of Squadron Leader level or lower. It would be fairly easy to stop them with minimal casualties if they were to go rogue.”

“I have to contest that last point,” said Killua. “Hypothetically, if Ikalgo were to attack humans, his ability would allow him to hide in the corpses of his victims and keep jumping from body to body, so it’d be very hard to tell who he was impersonating. And we don’t know the abilities of a lot of the others, like Colt.”

“He could still only kill a few people at a time,” countered Cheadle. “Killua, right? According to the report on my desk, which _you_ are listed as a source of information for, Neferpitou’s ability to turn victims into Nen-wielding puppets allowed the ants to kill approximately half a million people in a single day.”

“That was under different circumstances! The population was isolated from each other and the world and already brainwashed into not fighting back by Diego! The puppets aren’t that strong, they’d be easy to take out!”

“So how many could she kill now? Only a hundred thousand? Only ten thousand? And that’s not factoring in the risk of reproduction; the Royal Guard were the ones that converted five thousand people into Chimera Ant hybrids, correct?”

“That procedure was primarily based on Pouf’s Spiritual Message,” Pitou said. “It would be impossible to perform without him.”

“Who is that?” asked Cheadle.

“Uhh...” Leorio looked at the others. Gon shook his head – a slight movement, but enough to get the message across. “...Someone with reliable information on the Chimera Ants’ abilities. Anyway, we’ve considered the risks, believe me. But Gon and Killua are both confident that Pitou can be trusted. They were both on the mission, everyone else who was on the mission trusts them, and they’ve probably interacted with Pitou more than any other human alive. They’re the authorities here.”

“They’re thirteen years old, Leorio. They might be Pros, but they’re still kids. I understand what they did, but you haven’t convinced me they have the emotional maturity -”

“You’re saying that ‘cause you’re sitting behind a desk!” interrupted Knuckle. “How long did you meet Gon for, five minutes? And you never met Killua at all! You don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, so stop talking down to guys who do!”

“...And that’s Knuckle Bine,” Leorio added. “A third person who was on the mission, and who agrees with Gon and Killua. And I agree with them too. The others told me the whole story on the way over here, but actually meeting Pitou I don’t think she’s a threat anymore.”

A sigh came over the phone. “Fine… okay, I, personally, trust your judgement. However, I’m not making a decision without a supermajority of the Zodiacs. But don’t get your hopes up. That creature killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people! That’s not something everyone on the council will be willing to forgive.”

Leorio gritted his teeth and stood up. “Don’t give me that BS!” he shouted, waving the phone wildly in front of his face. “The damn association gave Killua’s dirtbag brother a license, didn’t you? And Hisoka? And even after that the only one of you bastards who wasn’t against reforming the Commandments and the Exam process was Pariston, and who knows what ulterior motives he has! And another thing: a supermajority’s eight members! But Ging’s probably vanished into thin air again, and he’d be the most likely to trust Gon’s judgement, so you’re taking away a guaranteed vote. We shouldn’t need more than seven!”

Cheadle eventually conceded that only a majority of the Zodiacs present would be sufficient, and when Botobai also proved unavailable the critical number of votes was reduced to six

“My ability lets me force a target into a state of Zetsu for thirty days,” Knuckle said as soon as all ten were on the conference call. “If you guys really don’t trust Pitou I can use that for a sort of probationary period. But I ain’t doing that unless I absolutely have to. Pitou’s got a healing ability she can use on herself, so it’d be cruel to prevent her from using it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Pitou. “Even if my Nen is restored I won’t use Doctor Blythe on my current injuries. They’re the consequence of my own actions, and I refuse to erase the price of my mistakes.”

_ Does ‘mistakes’ mean killing Kite, or failing to protect the King by killing me? _ Gon wondered. But it didn’t matter. Even if it was the latter, Pitou had made it clear that she didn’t blame him, or anyone else but herself for the King’s death. They weren’t enemies anymore.

There was a delay of a couple of seconds, then a choking, spluttering sound from the other end of the line as Cheadle worked out who the voice was – evidently in the middle of a sip of some beverage. “You’ve got her  _ there? _ Leorio, please tell me you’re not asking for permission after the fact...”

“What do you mean after the fact?” replied Leorio. “We’re still in the damn hospital, waiting for you people to give us the all-clear!”

It took over an hour for the Zodiacs to make a decision. Knuckle paid attention to the argument at first, but when Leorio said Gon had never been wrong about deciding to trust a person, and Saccho said: “Yes… the operative word being  _ person _ ,” Knuckle stormed out, saying he had to run an errand. 

Gon wanted to grab his phone back from Leorio and argue back… but he couldn’t, not when he’d felt the exact same way until just minutes earlier. “Just turn the speaker off...” he said. He could still hear the voices from across the room, but not well enough to make out what was being said. Pitou’s ears still twitched and swiveled periodically, though, and he noticed the slight changes in her expression as she followed the conversation.

In the end, it was Pariston who saved them. By voting ‘no’ and not explaining his reasoning, he first caused the others to believe he was trying to manipulate them into voting against him, then that such a manipulation was too simple and obvious. Mizaistom, Saccho, and Kanzai’s ‘no’ votes were unswayed, but Saiyu, Cluck, and Gel flipped, and Piyon and Ginta were in favor from the start. With Cheadle, that made six.

“The Zodiacs have decided, by majority, to allow Neferpitou to live and to release her under the supervision of Gon Freecss.” The chairwoman handed down the decision, now with the speaker back on and everyone listening intently.

“Yes!” Gon shouted under his breath, pumping a fist in the air.

“We have also decided against using Knuckle’s ability to seal Neferpitou in a state of Zetsu. As Mizaistom pointed out, if she’s hostile but was still able to convince the four of you, nothing would prevent her from feigning cooperation until any probation period expired. However, this decision may be changed should we receive evidence that the Ant poses a danger to humanity. I’ll notify the Hunter in charge of the recovered cocoons as soon as possible.”

“All right. Thanks again for listening to what we had to say. I guess I’ll see you around if the Hunter Association has another big meeting, right?” Leorio hung up. Tossing the beetle phone back to Gon, he made an exaggerated gesture of mopping his brow. “Whew! That went better than I expected!

The conversation turned to Pitou’s medical file, which Leorio had obtained from the doctor, and her ability. Pitou was still curious about how she had survived, as were Gon and Killua, and Leorio explained that he was interested in Nen healing as well.

“Those are some nasty X-rays,” Leorio commented. “Looks like someone who got run over by a truck. I see a lot of partially healed fractures, but here… and here… your skull’s nearly transparent, and so’s this big chunk of spine, and the bone density’s low pretty much everywhere. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought these were from an osteoporosis patient!”

Pitou looked closely at the picture, turning it over and over. “Gon… you said my head was destroyed in the fight, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And then I was impaled through the chest?”

“By his arm,” said Killua. “I don’t see any signs of that...”

“About here?” she indicated the darker area on the chest X-ray.

“Yeah, that looks pretty close.”

“Then this confirms that, somehow, I was brought back by Asclepius,” Pitou said solemnly. “Its instructions are to regenerate organs and other tissue vital to life first, then to partially repair other damage – bones, tendons, muscles – to a point where it can heal naturally, so this is what I would have expected it to do.”

“Why’d it grow back all the skin, then?” asked Gon. “That isn’t vital, is it?”

“No, the skin is vital to preventing infection,” answered Leorio. “That’s why burns that destroy large areas of the skin are so dangerous, especially without antibiotics.”

Pitou nodded. “Doctor Blythe can close wounds by stretching the surrounding skin together, but Asclepius can only regenerate it. And it doesn’t have the ability to prioritize areas on a single part of the body, so to regenerate a head or limb it would have to restore the entire surface area.”

“That makes sense,” said Leorio. “It looks like there were a few cuts and abrasions elsewhere on your body it didn’t fix, but I guess it was focused on your head, chest, and upper back.”

The door to the room flew open. It was unlocked and unlatched, having been propped open by a wooden chock, but it was still steel as thick as a bank vault and extremely heavy. Nevertheless, it was kicked with such force that it nearly hit the opposite wall. Knuckle burst in, grinning like a maniac, with a pair of shopping bags under his arm. “Hey, guys!” he announced. “The guys guarding the ward said they just got a call from upstairs and said we can get Pitou out of here!” The door banged shut behind him, rattling the outside shutter on its track. “Actually, it kinda sounded like you’d overstayed your welcome.”

“Overstayed it? What, are they trying to free up beds?” asked Leorio. “This isn’t exactly a normal room.”

Knuckle shrugged. “One of them said they were all praying that cable held up after she broke the first two sets of straps they tried to tie her to the bed with.”

“Ohhh...” A hint of a smile flitted across Pitou’s face. “The first ones I broke by accident trying to stretch. The second ones I broke when they tried to force-feed me. I don’t think they were convinced that I wasn’t trying to harm them or escape.”

“They tried to force-feed you?” Gon repeated, shocked. Why would they… wait, if they’d had Pitou in a straitjacket or something she’d have been unable to eat or drink on her own, but why would she call it forced? “Were you starving yourself?” he asked. Now that he thought about it, Pitou seemed thinner than before, almost like how Knov seemed to have gotten thinner after his encounter with Shaiapouf’s En.

“After I woke up, and they told me that Meruem was...” Pitou shut her eyes tightly and grimaced. “I wanted to die. Part of me still does, but… I’m going to keep living.”

Gon smiled, almost from ear to ear. “Then we should get something to eat as soon as we leave!” he said. “What do you li – wait. Never mind.” That probably wasn’t a question he wanted to know the answer to. He knew that during the Queen’s reign most of the Chimera Ants had lived on animals eaten raw, but once the King and Royal Guard left the nest, they’d probably eaten humans. “Do you remember any kind of food you like when you were human?” he asked. That probably wasn’t a great bet either. Most of the residents of NGL barely grew enough to survive, and according to Meleoron and Ikalgo, Gyro’s forces didn’t have much choice either.

“I don’t have any memories of being a human,” Pitou answered. Her eyes broke contact with his and went to the wall. “I’ve never tried human food before.” It was clear she was thinking the same thing as he was.

“Well, we’ll find something good in the city,” said Killua. He looked up from his phone. “I just texted Ikalgo and Alluka. They’re heading back to the car.” He took a deep breath. “I guess if I can trust you with Gon, I can trust you with my little sister. I’ll introduce you...”

“Your sister?” Pitou tilted her head slightly.

“Yeah. Brothers and sisters are well… I guess since you all came from the Queen, Meruem and Pouf and Youpi would all technically be your brothers, wouldn’t they?”

“Hmm… now that you mention it, I think so. Although… would your sister be frightened by me?”

“Nah. Alluka’s fine… and so are most humans. The government declared you Ants a new kind of magical beast and covered up most of… what happened.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Leorio said. “Ikalgo and Meleoron get a few stares, but most people will probably just think you’re a human who’s gotten plastic surgery to look like an animal. Hell, you look as human as half the Zodiacs!”

Pitou nodded. She looked down at the cable holding her arm to the bed, and the heavy steel cuff attaching it to her wrist. Slowly, purposely, she leaned forward and pulled. The bed frame creaked, and the already-bent pipe the cable was attached to bent further until it violently snapped, leaving the cuff and cable still attached to her arm.

“Oh… right, yeah!” Knuckle reached into his coat pocket and chuckled. “Forgot about that! Here!” He withdrew a key and after a bit of twisting, managed to remove the cuff. “Oh, and these are for you too...” From the shopping bags he produced a pair of black pinstriped pants, packages of socks and panties, a pair of slippers, a white undershirt, and a long navy-blue jacket with a single row of silvery buttons, and tossed them onto the end of the bed.

“Whoa, was that your errand?” Gon asked.

“Yeah. I figured they probably threw Pitou’s old clothes out like they did with mine and Shoot’s, and it sucks wearing those stupid gowns outside a hospital.”

“Yeah, I think they probably did...” Pitou’s eyes moved to her right hand for a second and she shuddered slightly.

“I have no idea if these’ll fit, though,” said Knuckle. “Especially the pants and shoes.”

Pitou eyed the pants and picked them up, experimentally stretching the elastic band that occupied the beltline. “No, these seem right...” Knuckle had even cut a hole in the back for her tail.

“The socks don’t match, though...” Killua tore open the package and raised one into the air. “These have horizontal stripes.”

Knuckle looked like he’d swallowed a pine cone. “Crap.”

“How did you guys even get those clothes?” Gon asked. “They seemed pretty modern, and we had to take off anything metal when we went into NGL.”

“Hmm...” Pitou raised a finger to her chin. “As far as I know, some of the soldiers just stole them from the humans. You’re right that none of the humans around the old nest wore anything like these, though.”

“Maybe what was his name, the NGL leader’s goons had a stockpile for when they were infiltrating groups of civilians in other countries?” offered Leorio.

“Maybe.” Pitou stretched her good arm and pulled the blanket off her, then with some difficulty rose from the bed. She tried to put weight on her right foot, winced, and lifted it again. She wobbled slightly, her tail lashing from side to side to keep her balance. Once she was steady, she reached behind her back with her good arm. Before anyone could point out that maybe they should leave the room, the hospital gown fell to the floor.

The reactions were immediate. Knuckle turned bright red and developed a keen interest in a poster of the human circulatory system hanging on the wall. Killua calmly noted the absence of a belly button or nipples. It made sense, he thought: the ants weren’t really mammals. And Leorio let out a strangled scream, and threw himself backwards, toppling both him and the swivel chair with a loud crash. Pieces of paper from the medical file drifted down on top of him like leaves.

“Seriously?” Killua stared in disbelief at the man twitching on the floor. “I thought you were training to be a doctor, don’t you have to look at naked people all the time?”

“Only _dead_ naked people so far!” Leorio got to his feet, rubbing his head and adjusting his glasses. His eyes also found the poster. “Besides, I was surprised!”

The only person who hadn’t turned to look at Leorio was Gon. He couldn’t look away from Pitou, or more specifically, from the still-visible stripe of bright blue bruises across her stomach and the plastic brace on her right leg.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • A bit of a lighter chapter since the last one was so heavy.  
>  • Not totally sure whether the Zodiacs would let a creature that was potentially in the top five or so Nen users on the planet live, but these are mostly Netero’s buddies we’re talking about. Why did Pariston vote to get rid of Pitou? Perhaps he genuinely believed Pitou was dangerous and unlike some of the Zodiacs has no qualms whatsoever about executing a surrendered enemy because they might be dangerous. Perhaps he doesn’t want a powerful opposition to the five thousand new Chimera Ants he’s taking control of. Who knows what the hell Pariston’s thinking?  
>  • I regret absolutely nothing about writing Pitou disrobing in front of everyone, for two reasons. 1: Togashi already drew… like, metaphorical Pitou nudity in whatever chapter corresponds to Episode 112. And Welfin and Rammot’s stupid thongs. And the scene of Gon and Killua accidentally teleporting in on Hisoka when he was bathing. And just Hisoka in general. 2: It gave me an opportunity for Leorio-based comedy.   
>  • Knuckle picked out long pants for Pitou because, unlike the shorts she had, they cover her knees, which for someone in the world of Hunter x Hunter would be the big giveaway that she’s not human. Her ears and possibly tail could be replicated with plastic surgery, and her hands look like they’d be possible for a human with a birth defect. But the bits of exoskeleton on her knees (and probably her elbows but she wears long sleeves) are very clearly not human.


	5. Bloodlust x And x Malice?

Killua had seen Pitou’s concern for Komugi during the confrontation in the palace, and accepted it was real long before Gon did. He trusted Gon’s judgement, and he believed the remorse the ant showed for her actions was genuine. But he still couldn’t help but feel concerned as they all clambered into the rental car and slowly weaved their way down the crowded streets to pick up Alluka and Ikalgo. Pitou had been concerned for  _ one _ human, if that. But this was still a creature that considered ordinary humans nothing more than food and playthings. The bloodlust oozing from her aura when she took Kite’s arm, and the vicious wave of En that had struck them at the palace, had affected him as much as they had Gon – no, perhaps more. ‘Worse than Hisoka’s, worse that my brother’s...’ he remembered himself saying. And it wasn’t even close. Even if he hadn’t had the needle in his head he didn’t think he could have helped being paralyzed the first time he felt it.

He’d seen more of Pitou’s handiwork, too. He’d fought the corpses of East Gorteau soldiers, reanimated on puppet strings by the same ability that had given them false hope that Kite still lived. At least, it had given Gon false hope. After dispatching so many of the things, and seeing them crumple lifeless to the ground, it had gotten harder for Killua to believe that their friend and mentor was still alive. It was like Illumi’s ability. He hadn’t known what Nen was when he first learned about the Needlemen, but he knew that once the needles went in they were empty shells of former human beings. But Killua hadn’t completely given up, and he hadn’t dared share his fear with Gon, not without proof.

Killua had seen the glassy-eyed, lurching puppets, many with stitched-together wounds where their hearts used to be. He’d seen the mass graves, and the empty villages, and all the signs of murder, performed analytically and without feeling at an industrial scale, far more than Gon had. What the hell was he thinking, introducing the creature that had done all of that to his little sister?

But at the same time, Killua had seen the unblinking stare of dead bodies too many times to count. Many of them, most even, were dead because he’d killed them, and if he thought about it many of them probably didn’t deserve it. But he’d never felt much of anything doing it. They were just the targets, the enemy. He was just doing his job. Even now, even after he’d decided he wasn’t an assassin anymore, he couldn’t really make himself care very much about the people he’d killed. So was he really in a position to judge Pitou for killing her targets, her enemies, without feeling? Her target had just been an entire country.

...”Kitty?” Alluka asked. Knuckle stifled a snort. Alluka tilted her head from side to side, following the slow twitching motion of Pitou’s tail. “Is your tail real?”

Pitou hesitated for a split-second, looking from side to side like she was unsure if she was on a hidden camera show. “I was born with it, yes,” she answered.

“Oh...” Alluka didn’t seem sure how to react to the reply either.

“Pitou’s… the same as Ikalgo,” Gon explained. “They’re both Magical Beasts.”

“That’s right!” Ikalgo said. “My tentacles are real, aren’t they?”

“Hmm… can I touch your ears?” Alluka asked innocently.

Killua tensed. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to happen. There was no way Pitou would actually attack over something as trivial as that request. He knew that logically. But the image of his sister covered in scars and lurching around on puppet strings with blank, soulless eyes still leaped into his head.

There was a flicker of irritation on Pitou’s face, but it was replaced by a smile Killua might have even called deferential. “You may,” she said. She carefully knelt, bringing her right hand to the floor and sliding the crutch she’d been using since they left the hospital out to the side.

“They’re so soft...” said Alluka. Pitou’s ears flicked back at her touch just like a real cat’s, but her face remained placid.

Killua breathed a sigh of relief. Stupid, worrying over nothing.

A heavyset middle-aged man barged past, talking loudly into his cell phone. He tripped over Pitou’s crutch, stumbled forward, and nearly fell. Swearing, he spun around and stomped towards the group again. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing, you dumbass freak!”

Pitou whirled towards him, instantly wedging the end of the crutch in a crack in the pavement and rising to her feet – or foot. Her aura was still gone, but Killua saw a flash of malice in her eyes, the same look he’d seen in NGL. There wasn’t even any question that she could kill the man effortlessly. Killua thought back to how Netero had toyed with them on the airship ride during the exam, only using one leg and one arm. And he and Gon were a lot stronger and faster than ordinary people, even back then, and Pitou had to be at least on the Chairman’s level.

“Don’t...” Killua warned, stepping forward. Placing his left hand behind his back, he let a spark of electricity snap between his fingers, creating a buzzing sound he knew Pitou’s sensitive hearing would pick up.

“Why don’t _you_ watch where you’re going, you fat idiot!” Leorio shouted. “You’re the one who almost ran into someone on crutches because you weren’t paying attention to anything besides your damn phone!”

“One of you being injured doesn’t give you little punks the right to stand around blocking the whole damn street!” the man jabbed a finger at Leorio.

Despite the situation Killua almost laughed.  _ Little _ punks? The guy was average height, maybe a little shorter. Leorio and Knuckle both towered over him, and Pitou still had a few centimeters on him.

“We weren’t blocking anything, fool!” Knuckle sneered. “If you’re in that big a hurry, then why don’t you get outta here?” He shuffled towards the man, removing his hands from his pockets.

“Don’t take another step!” The angry man started to back away, brandishing his phone like a weapon. “I’ll – I’ll call the cops!”

“Oh yeah? Go ahead, call ‘em, you’re the one picking a fight!” Knuckle rolled up his right sleeve. “And while you’re at it call the fire department, because they’re gonna need the jaws of life to remove my foot from your ass!”

That got rid of the man. He made a hasty retreat, ranting into his cell phone about gangs of delinquents.

“That wasn’t necessary,” said Pitou. “He was extremely weak. Even in my current state he couldn’t have injured me.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Leorio. “But you’re still on double secret probation with the Zodiacs, and we’re licensed Hunters so the cops would believe the truth from us.”

_ That’s one way of putting it, _ Killua thought.

“By the way, Killua?” Gon whispered. “Were you really going to use your Hatsu on that guy? Even I could’ve taken him.”

Killua shrugged, and lied: “I could’ve stunned him without hurting him and told the cops I had a stun gun up my sleeve. Knuckle or Leorio probably would’ve broken his nose.” Gon seemed as honest as ever. Killua was certain he really believed what his words implied. Did that mean he hadn’t noticed Pitou’s bloodlust? Gon was normally pretty observant of that kind of thing. Or was  _ he _ the one who’d misread the ant’s intent? He thought there was a good chance he, Leorio, and Knuckle had saved the man’s life, but he couldn’t be certain. He was pretty sure Pitou  _ wanted _ to kill him, but she hadn’t been in position to spring. Would she have acted on that desire without his intervention? Perhaps if the guy had kept pushing. But then, killing people for bumping into him and picking a fight was something  _ he’d _ done, back during the Hunter Exam. And even back then, he would never have killed Leorio, or Kurapika, or Gon. Not of his own volition, at least. For a long time after the exam ended, even after his friends came to visit the Zoldyck Estate, he’d been afraid that if Mother or Illumi ordered him to, he would.

Was Pitou’s current state that much different from the way he was when he first ran away from home? Killua still remembered how strange, and how intoxicating, the feeling that someone else cared about him without conditions or expectations of him being useful to them was. It was still hard sometimes to believe that it was  _ normal _ , that the widening eyes and gasps of horror intended to get on the rare occasions he talked about life at home were because his family wasn’t normal, that they weren’t what a family was supposed to be. Before he met Gon he thought the bond he had with Alluka was an aberration.

Alluka. After the family had locked her up, Killua had almost made himself forget her for a long time because he believed there was no way of saving her. Not without utterly defying his family’s will or revealing the secret that would have made them even more desperate to control Nanika’s power. It wasn’t until Gon had put himself in a state where Nanika was the only one who could save him that Killua was pushed into desperate action. He felt bad for thinking there was any positive effect from his friend coming so close to death, but he had to admit that if Gon hadn’t done it, Alluka would probably still be locked up in that vault. But then, if he thought about it, Pitou was the only reason Gon had made that vow. In a way, she was part of why he’d been able to save Alluka too.

 

Killua wouldn’t discover the truth about Pitou until late that night, though. Not too long after the tripping incident, while they were looking for a place for dinner, Gon realized that they hadn’t booked a hotel for that night. The closest place with open rooms was in another city, and it was well past dark by the time they reached it.

The group ended up in three adjacent rooms. Killua, Alluka, and Ikalgo took one, with the siblings sharing one of the two beds. Leorio and Knuckle were in another room, and Gon and Pitou were in the third. The arrangement made Killua nervous – if Pitou’s Nen came back, and something happened, no one was right there. But in a way, that almost made things safer. Killua and Knuckle were the only ones with any chance of even landing a hit, but Pitou also knew enough about their abilities to know that they were potentially dangerous and could be countered by attacking before they could be activated. Gon, at least, was so obviously no longer a threat that if Pitou’s objective was escape he was unlikely to be attacked. At least, that idea was what helped Killua get to sleep.

But he awoke again with a jolt. Even before his eyes flew open, the feeling was unmistakeable. That dense, vicious aura surrounded him, tearing at him like a thousand knives. In a tiny fraction of a second he was out of bed, and in another moment Speed of Lightning was active, propelling him out the door into the hallway. Going too fast to turn easily, he rebounded off the opposite wall with a kick and landed outside the next door, already reaching out to send a jolt of current through the electronic lock to force the bolt open. “Gon!” he screamed.

Ripping open the door, he entered the room just in time to see Pitou mid-leap. The ant’s body twisted in midair, righting herself. She landed lightly on her good leg, facing Killua, but ended up with her weight on both of them in an awkward splayed-out crouch. Her right arm was raised in a blocking position, and her aura surged with even more inhuman power. Killua froze. Even with Godspeed, he wouldn’t be quick enough to reach him, not now. But something wasn’t right, something that the split-second wasn’t enough to process.

Time started to move normally again. Leorio and Knuckle charged into the room behind Killua, also shouting Gon’s name. Ikalgo was right behind them. Gon finally stirred. He sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, and stared at the scene with his mouth hanging open in confusion.

“Get the hell away from him!” Killua screamed.

Pitou looked just as confused as Gon. “...you?” she gasped, staring at the three Hunters. “Why?...”

“What’s going on?” Gon asked.

“She was about to kill you!” Ikalgo shouted with barely enough breath for the words.

“I wasn’t! I didn’t do anything!” Pitou protested. Killua noticed her right leg, still in the brace, was trembling, and his eyes followed Gon’s to the crutch, still leaning against the near wall.

“You think we can’t feel your Nen through walls?” Knuckle gestured at said wall.

“Huh?” Gon surveyed the scene again. Then his face lit up. “Pitou, turn your En off!” he ordered.

“Huh? But-”

“Turn it off!”

Pitou took a deep breath and shut her eyes. The malicious aura – or at least, what Killua had thought – no, had  _ assumed _ was a malicious aura vanished. Immediately, Pitou slumped forward, taking weight off her right leg and catching herself with her arm to avoid falling.

With the strength of the aura no longer seeming to crush Killua with all directions, his brain finally put the pieces together. En. The unused crutch. The timing of what had happened – Pitou had to have started to move well  _ after _ he did. He’d reacted to her aura, but had she only moved in reaction to sensing him approach with En? And her leap hadn’t put her in a position where she could have even reached Gon. Instead, she’d placed herself directly between him and the door. Her expression, and the emotion he’d fault in her aura through what he’d assumed was malice, had only changed to confusion after he’d frozen, after she’d recognized him. Before that… was it his it his imagination, or was there  _ fear _ ? But what really gave things away, what made Killua freeze even before he realized it consciously, was how closely her posture resembled what he’d seen in the palace, when Pitou was keeping herself between an injured Komugi and Gon’s wrath. Only this time… it seemed impossible, but she had to have been trying to defend  _ Gon. _

Killua took a deep breath. “Pitou?...” he asked. “Did you start using En when your Nen came back, and when you sensed me and Knuckle and Leorio and Ikalgo running towards you, you thought we were enemies?”

Pitou nodded. “I was woken up by sensing you approaching at high speed, yes.” 

“Wait… _woken up?_ ” Even after everything he’d witnessed in the last few months, Killua could barely believe what he was hearing. “Are you saying you can use En in your _sleep?_ ”

“Yeah. It took me a while to learn to do it – I started with just using it while concentrating it less and less until I could do it without thinking about it – but I knew if I mastered it it would be impossible for humans to disturb the nest until the King was born.”

“...that’s insane...” Leorio sank to his knees, his forehead dripping sweat. He wiped it on his pajama sleeve. “It took me a while to get to the point where I could keep my Ten up in my sleep, but En? I mean, I’ve gotten pretty good with it – I can get it to almost three meters if I really focus – but doing it in your sleep? And it extended to the other room, too...”

“Other room?” Knuckle snorted. “Pitou’s En extends up to two kilometers.”

Leorio made a noise like a rubber duck being tortured. “ _ Kilometers? _ Man, you guys weren’t kidding about the Royal Guards being on a different level. That’s… that’s just ridiculous…”

“I know!” Knuckle said. “It made our lives a living hell trying to find a way to get into the palace. I bet anyway else in this city who can use Nen got a nasty wake-up call!” he laughed. “Please tell me you can _stop_ using it in your sleep?”

“I should be able to.”

“Then stop. And don’t use it when you’re awake either.”

Pitou’s eyes, glowing like yellow lamps in the reflected light of the hallway, narrowed. “I can’t do that.”

A vein pulsed on Knuckle’s forehead. “You just said you could!”

“When I stopped using En before… when I had to heal Meruem’s arm… that’s what allowed you to infiltrate the Palace, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t had to stop, he might not have died. I won’t let that happen again!”

“Killua?” A voice that sounded like Alluka’s asked. “What’s happening?”

Killua turned around. His sister was standing nervously in the hallway, peaking around the edge of the doorframe. “It’s okay, Nanika,” he said. “Pitou just had a bad dream. You can go back to bed. I will too in a few minutes.”

“Kay...” Nanika yawned, and her head disappeared around the corner again.

“Pitou… you don’t have to protect me with En. I can take care of myself, even if I can’t use Nen anymore,” said Gon. “So can Killua and Knuckle and Leorio and Ikalgo. Nobody’s going to attack us.”

“The King didn’t believe a serious attack was likely either. He said my En was irritating him, and he would have made me remove it if I couldn’t shape it to avoid the upper floors of the palace.”

“That was a different situation!” Ikalgo countered. “No offense, but you guys pretty much had a price on your heads from the most powerful humans in the world! None of us have made enemies like that… and anyone who knows what _you_ are isn’t gonna be dumb enough to attack directly.”

Pitou’s expression remained unchanged.

“Look,” Killua said. “This isn’t about being irritated. It doesn’t seem like you’re doing it intentionally, but your aura feels like you’re oozing bloodlust, and you’re strong enough that it’s _dangerous._ One of our friends nearly ran into Pouf’s En while he was in Zetsu, and the stress probably took ten years off his life. If someone who’s sensitive to Nen but can’t use Ten walks into it, they could die of a heart attack or something. Hell… Gon, you can’t sense auras anymore, right?”

“Right.” Gon nodded. “I just guessed Pitou was using En because of the way you both reacted to each other.”

“It’s lucky that you can’t. Otherwise you losing your hair like Knov would be the best-case scenario.” After realizing that Pitou, sensing auras she believed were hostile, had immediately moved to shield Gon, Killua knew his words would immediately end any argument about her using En. But when the Ant hung her head like a scolded child and her eyes filled with tears, he regretted being so blunt. “Sorry… I know you feel guilty about not being able to protect the King. I shouldn’t have used that against you. And I understand if you’re worried about an attack coming out of nowhere after what happened. But until you can learn to control… whatever it is that makes your aura seem so nasty, it’s just too dangerous to use it all the time.”

“Anyway, expanding your aura like that also attracts attention,” Knuckle pointed out. “And right now you’re the one most likely to have powerful enemies. En also has limits. How many people did you pick up when you had it active?”

Pitou hesitated a moment. “Too many to count. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands.”

“How many Nen users?”

“Just you.”

“Wrong!” Knuckle pointed dramatically. Leorio, Ikalgo, and Killua immediately shushed him, and Leorio pointed to the digital alarm clocks between the two beds. One read 3:44, the other 3:43. “Sorry,” he said in a more normal voice. “Every single one of those people could be a Nen user.”

“What, using Zetsu?” asked Gon. “But if someone in Zetsu got caught in Pitou’s Aura -”

“They’d have to stop using it immediately to protect against it, and they’d get spotted,” said Knuckle. “Yeah. But what about using Ten and In at the same time?”

“You can do that?” asked Killua. “I mean – I guess Wing said it was possible, but your opponent would be tipped off and use Gyo.”

“Me personally? Nope. It’s tough to pull off. But there are guys who can do it, like Shoot. I’m surprised you can’t do it since you’re an assassin. Anyway, you can’t use Gyo on your En, fool! If someone disguises their aura while they’re fighting you, you know because you see them using less aura than they should be. But if someone’s just acting like a normal person? You can’t tell for sure with En if someone’s not a Nen user or if they’re using In. That’s why you don’t use En in a crowd: you use it when you know anyone who enters the radius has a high chance of being an enemy.”

“That makes sense.” Pitou’s tail twitched idly. “At the nest, before Meruem was born, I could be sure any human entering my En was an enemy. And at the Palace, I could be sure anyone entering unauthorized was. Nyow I get it.”

“Yeah. That’s pretty much it.” Knuckle started out of the room. “I’m going back to bed.”

“I’m with ya...” Leorio followed him. He noted the charred lock on the door. “That thing’s not gonna unlock from the outside anymore. We’re lucky it didn’t set the smoke alarms off.”

“I’ll pay for the damage tomorrow when we check out,” said Killua. “Ikalgo, would you let Na – Alluka know I’ll be back in a few minutes?”

Most of the group left, and it was just Gon, Killua, and Pitou in the dark room. Killua didn’t bother turning the lights on. It was easy enough to see anyway.

“Why didn’t you leave with the others?” Pitou asked.

“I just… I wanted to know a couple things,” Killua said. “When you jumped out of bed to protect Gon, did you think it was him you were protecting, or the King?”

Pitou hesitated again. “I don’t know. I was still partially asleep. I remember a gigantic glowing dragon seizing the King and carrying him away. I tried to reach him, but then I turned around, and Doctor Blythe was sewing my tail to the floor and I couldn’t dispel it. But when I woke up… I think I knew he was gone, but I knew there was someone important I had to protect.”

Killua winced. So what he’d told Nanika hadn’t been a lie after all. It was still strange to think of a creature like Pitou as having nightmares, any more than he could imagine his father or big brother having them. As much as he understood her humanity, it was still hard not to think of her as  _ being _ a nightmare given flesh.

Gon slid out of bed and knelt next to Pitou, laying his hand on her shoulder. “I know...” he said softly. “I know what it feels like. I want to tell you how to stop believing it’s your fault that you couldn’t protect him, but I can’t. I don’t know how… if I did I would’ve done it, but I can’t, even after Kite told me himself it wasn’t my fault...”

“You were there too, in my dream,” Pitou admitted. “It changed. Meruem’s body was burned and pierced by the thorns of a rose bush. I was begging you to let me heal him, but you kept saying no, that if I didn’t heal Kite you’d kill the King. I tried to fix him, but Doctor Blythe just kept taking him apart – taking the stitches apart, taking limbs off, and his head – and you kept getting angrier and angrier, but I couldn’t make it stop.” She paused. Her eyes looked like they were staring straight through the mattress, through the floor, straight at a ghost. “Your body and your aura changed, just like… how it actually happened. I tried to get to the King, but his body started to smoke and turn to ash, and Doctor Blythe sewed my tail to the ground again. I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t run...” Her voice was breaking every few words now. In the dim light, it was hard to see much of her face besides her eyes, but they were shimmering and wavering, swimming in tears. “You kept hitting me with your technique, your Janken, over and over, but Terpsichora kept forcing me to get back up and stand there...”

“Pitou, it’s okay...” Gon put his arm around her. “I know this is my fault. I can’t change what I did or take any of it back, but I’m sorry you feel like this… I don’t know how much I can help, but… you can talk to me or Killua.”

Killua knew the crutch was more a matter of convenience than anything, especially now that Pitou could use Nen again. She was perfectly capable of moving on one leg. But he was glad when she let Gon help her stand, and support her for the few steps back into bed. Gon sat down next to her.

“I had dreams too. About Kite...” Gon said. “After we found him in the nest. Mostly you, strapping him to a table and cutting him up, with… saws and knives and scissors and things. And I was there always, but I couldn’t move. And sometimes he’d look up and tell me I was weak and useless and I shouldn’t have come with him, or sometimes you’d say that...”

“Gon...” Killua was close to tearing up himself. _Why did you never tell me?_ Was what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t, not when there were so many things he’d never told Gon. Things he should have told him. He’d always tried to stay calm, stay logical, to avoid worrying him. But… _Since it means nothing to you…_ Had he come across like he didn’t care? “I didn’t have nightmares about Kite,” he said. “I was worried about him… but mostly I was worried about you. The whole time I was worried that you’d die, or we’d find out Kite couldn’t be saved and it would break you…”

“You mean, you knew Kite was dead?” Gon asked in disbelief. “Or, I guess he wasn’t dead, but his body at least since we couldn’t know...”

“I didn’t know...” Killua shook his head. “I didn’t know one way or the other, but I wanted to believe he was still alive, and I let you convince me. I’m sorry, Gon. I should have warned you that he could have been. Maybe if I had, maybe you wouldn’t have...”

“You don’t need to apologize, Killua.” Gon reached up and pulled him down into a hug. “Or at least… Ging said when you apologize to a friend, there’s one rule. You have to promise to do things differently. But I don’t know what you could have done differently.”

“I promise to not lie to you to try to protect your feelings, so if the worst-case scenario happens, you won’t be totally unprepared.”

“That’s fine.” Gon let go of Killua. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, but he was smiling. “I promise to listen next time.”

“Yeah… anyway, I should get back to bed. But, Pitou?” Killua waited until he was sure he had the ant’s attention. “I’m sorry I misjudged you.” 

It was funny, Killua thought as he headed back to his own room. He’d seen the signs of Pitou’s humanity before Gon had, and at first it had been easier for him to let go of his enmity of the ant. But he still had reservations and misgivings. Gon, though? If he thought about it, that was how Gon always was. Once he decided to trust someone, that was it, he was committed to it. Gon was still affected by what Pitou had done, there was no question of that, but it seemed like it was in the past in his mind, and he was determined to move past it. That was one of the things that had always drawn Killua to Gon. It was part of the light he’d been afraid would be extinguished, either by Pitou or Gon’s own anger. But it seemed like it had come back. And Pitou? There was no longer any question in Killua’s mind that Gon was safe with her, maybe even safer than he’d be alone. Had the protective instincts of a Royal Guard, left with no King to protect, transferred their target? Or was this her true nature? Either way, it seemed like the strongest enemy he and Gon had ever faced somehow coming back to life was one of the best things that had happened to them.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Note about ordinary people’s ability to perceive Nen. Pre-Nen Gon and Killua could feel Hisoka and Illumi’s auras just fine, and Gon felt Wing’s even when it was focused on Killua, but the Heaven’s Arena attendants didn’t notice it. In the palace, Bizeff and Komugi, one a completely ordinary human and one an “unconscious Nen user” with no actual defenses neither noticed nor were affected by Pitou’s aura. Also, a Nen user in Zetsu can see aura despite the Micropyles in their eyes being closed. Finally, Pike was able to see Pokkle’s Nen despite not being able to actually use it at the time. I think what this means is there’s a sort of paradox of strength: non-Nen-users with a strong enough life force can start to sense aura even if their pores are closed and they can’t harness their own auras. But this also renders them far more vulnerable to it. Gon, at present, has burnt himself out to a state where he isn’t aura-sensitive either.  
>  • Leorio can use En when Gon and Killua can’t, despite Gon and Killua being better Nen users overall. That’s because Leorio’s an Emitter – I figure En’s Emission since you’re extending your aura out away from your body – and got it early in his Hatsu training. Bisky didn’t teach Gon and Killua it for the same reason she didn’t teach them In; there wasn’t time and it wouldn’t be particularly useful for either of their Hatsu abilities (I mean, I guess Gon could make Scissors or Paper invisible to his opponents, but a giant mass of aura getting charged up and suddenly vanishing is going to make any competent opponent use Gyo).  
>  • Pitou was using En pretty much 24/7 for the ten days before the Palace Invasion at a minimum, and probably a lot longer considering that before Meruem’s birth she was guarding the nest and keeping Netero, Morel, and Knov from making a move. There’s no way anyone can go that long without sleep, so she had to have figured out how to use En in her sleep.  
>  • Is there a term where because two people have mutually caused each other’s worst trauma, they’re the best people to help each other get through it because even though they’re both a bit scared of each other they also feel guilty about what they did and helping the other with their fear helps them get over the guilt and somehow this all cancels out to an actually healthy relationship? Because that’s my headcanon for Gon and Pitou.


	6. Secret x Of x Asclepius

“So… let me get this straight...” the image of Biscuit Krueger on the computer screen shut her eyes. “You’re telling me that you fought Neferpitou because it couldn’t bring Kite back from the dead… you killed it… and you think it somehow brought _itself_ back from the dead?”

Gon nodded earnestly. “Yeah. Basically.”

“Don’t you think there’s a bit of a contradiction there?” Bisky had the tone of a parent explaining something to a toddler. “Assuming that the Ant _does_ have a Nen ability that could do this, wouldn’t it, logically, be able to bring Kite back?”

“I know,” said Gon. “We don’t understand what happened. That’s why we called you, to see if you could help figure it out. But I do have a theory. Pitou couldn’t have brought Kite back because Kite already came back a different way. He was already alive, but in a different body, so she couldn’t have done anything with his old o – whoa!” Gon toppled sideways into Killua, and there were similar noises of surprise from the surroundings.

“What’s going on over there?” asked Bisky.

“Nothing!” Gon steadied himself. “We just hit a little turbulence!

“Oh, you’re on an airship?” The webcam at the computer kiosk pointed towards the passenger cabin’s windows, but currently there was nothing but grey outside, with raindrops streaking the panes.

“Yeah,” said Killua. “Don’t worry, the weather’s fine at our destination, and it’s not really a bad storm. Leorio and Knuckle and Ikalgo’s flight got delayed though, apparently it’s hailing where they’re going.”

“Anyway...” Bisky took a sip from a floral-patterned pink mug of tea on her desk. “The first thing to do is rule out the obvious possibilities. Gon, are you positive you actually killed Pitou?”

Killua groaned. He and Gon exchanged a ‘Haven’t we already had this conversation?’ look. “Yes, we’re positive. Pitou’s head was completely destroyed, and she’s already confirmed that she doesn’t have any ability that would make that survivable.”

“Is there a possibility that someone else is somehow impersonating Pitou, either by manipulating or taking control of its body or by manipulating their own body?”

“Nope,” said Gon. “We talked about it on the way to the hospital, but there’s no way for anyone to copy all the details, or any reason to do so.”

“My brother can change his appearance with his needles,” added Killua. “Even with an ability like that, to copy the injuries Pitou had when she was found, they would have had to have seen what happened in the fight and have an idea of what a regeneration ability _would_ have done. That would be possible with any ability like Palm’s, but at that point you’re talking about a conspiracy of multiple Nen users with just the right ability and no clear motive. Plus… can any Nen ability change someone’s aura to resemble someone else’s?”

“You mean like their aura signature?” asked Bisky. “No. There are some Nen abilities that can imitate or copy other abilities, but it’s impossible to perfectly copy someone’s aura, especially not one with unusual properties.”

“Then there’s no chance. Knuckle and I both felt Pitou’s aura in the Palace, and again last night. It’s her all right. Nothing else alive even comes close.”

“Hmm...” Bisky scratched her forehead. “All right, I believe you. As surprising as it may seem, I don’t know _everything_ about Nen, but I’ll see if I have any ideas. Just describe everything that happened as accurately as possible.”

“All right,” said Gon. “But I don’t remember everything that well. It’d be better for you to hear both sides of the story directly.” He grabbed the webcam on top of the monitor and panned it sideways, bringing a blue-coated figure into the frame, then turned around. “Hey, Pitou? Are you feeling any better?”

There was a split-second delay as Bisky processed the meaning of the words, before she proceeded to spit a mouthful of tea all over her screen. Gon and Killua hadn’t described the situation that well. She’d been able to deduce that Gon had visited Pitou in the hospital after she was found inexplicably alive, and was somehow now on good terms with the Ant. That was already hard enough to believe. During the month they’d trained, she’d heard Gon whispering Kite’s name in his sleep, and she’d heard how close he’d come to killing or seriously injuring Morel when he told the boy to imagine him as the ant that had killed Kite. And she definitely hadn’t been expecting Pitou to actually be on the airship with them.

“A little,” Pitou answered flatly. She was hunched over on a seat by the window. She was watching either Gon and Killua or the computer screen intently, but far from the malevolent monster Gon and Killua had described – admittedly without much physical description besides “cat-like,” - she looked utterly miserable. Her ears were stuffed with cotton and paper towels, and her head was wrapped with gauze to hold the makeshift earplugs in place. She was clutching an empty airsickness bag like a drowning swimmer with a life preserver, and nausea had drained the blood from her face, which due to her biology turned her skin a rosy pink and made the partially-healed bruises even more prominent.

Bisky hadn’t expected Pitou to look so human. The only Chimera Ants she’d met – actual ants at least, not converted people like Palm - were Ikalgo and Meleoron. But through the camera she could also see the thin Ten barrier around Pitou’s body, dense red aura unlike anything she’d ever seen from a human being. With her decades of Nen experience, Bisky knew she was looking at a monster. She shuddered at the idea of Gon and Killua facing  _ that _ , in person, in an actual fight. It would have been difficult even for hardened veterans to hold their ground. Even more frightening was the idea that Gon had become something that could  _ beat _ Pitou. At least at the moment though, the aura didn’t seem genuinely malicious, and wasn’t as evil as Palm’s was, but that difference was overwhelmed by its sheer power.

Pitou looked at the crutch leaning between the seats next to her, but didn’t use it, standing and leaping across the aisle on one leg in a single fluid movement. But when the airship swayed again, she grabbed at the back of the chair to steady herself. Gon yielded the chair, and she sat down with about the expression Bisky imagined a cat trapped in a washing machine would have.

“How long until we come out of the clouds again?” Pitou asked Killua, her voice trembling slightly.

“Uhh… let me pull up the weather radar.” Killua clicked something and pointed to the screen. “We’ll still be in IMC for at least another hour, but once we get into the mountains your En should reach to the ground again.”

“Okay.” Pitou looked unsatisfied with the response. “So...” her eyes stared into the screen, reminding Bisky of a pair of sunset rubies. “You’re the one who taught Gon and Killua Nen?”

“Uhh… well, actually my student, Wing, taught them the basics, but I gave them more advanced instruction.” Bisky laughed nervously. “So… not a frequent flier, huh?”

Pitou glanced down at the airsickness bag. “Flying isn’t the problem – I was fine until we rose into the clouds. It’s swaying around without being able to see which way the ground is. I was able to avoid being disoriented by feeling the ground with my En for a while, but now we’re too high up for that.”

“Your En reached to the ground?” repeated Bisky. “Just how low are you flying?”

“Airliners like this cruise at about three thousand meters,” answered Killua, “And Pitou’s En reaches to about two thousand, but our route takes us over terrain as high as 2400, so she’ll be back in range pretty soon.”

“Two _thousand?_ ” Bisky nearly did another spit-take. “That’s insane!”

“Well, Pitou can reshape it so it has, uhh… tentacles,” said Gon. “So the average radius is only about half of that.”

“That’s still a kilometer. I’ve never heard of a Nen user reaching five hundred meters.” Bisky stepped away from the screen and rummaged in a bag, producing a notebook and a pen. “Anyway… before we begin, I have to ask this, since it’s bugging me...” she jabbed the pen forward. “What’s with the toilet paper in your ears?”

“The noise of the engines was irritating her,” explained Gon. “It’s a little annoying to me, but I think Pitou can hear high pitches better than humans can.”

Bisky grinned slightly. “Ah. And let me guess, using Gyo on your ears just makes it worse?”

Pitou nodded. “Don’t worry, I can still hear everything you’re saying.”

“Gyo is great for protecting against physical damage, including eye or ear injury from extremely bright lights or loud sounds. However, when used on sensory organs it also makes them more sensitive, so psychological effects are intensified. The more appropriate technique is something called Counterenhancement; it lets you reinforce a body part while leaving the associated sense unaffected, or even dulling it, so it’s a good way to defend against attacks that attempt to overwhelm your senses… anyway, where was I? Oh, yes.” Bisky’s pen hovered over her clipboard. “First, what’s your aura type? I’m guessing either Emitter or Manipulator if you can use En that well?”

“Nyope. I’m a Specialist.”

“Hmm...” Bisky scribbled something down. “What happens when you perform water divination?”

“The leaf withered and broke apart, sort of like it dried out and rotted, or turned to ash.”

“Really? That’s a new one...” Bisky whistled. “I’ve heard of the water being heated or cooled, the surface foaming or fizzing, or even the leaf growing. That’s interesting...”

Bisky went on to get Gon’s, Killua’s, and Pitou’s accounts of the battle, and its aftermath, and asked in detail about Pitou’s abilities. “Hang on...” she said. “So, this Terpsichora is an Automanipulation ability?”

“Auto manipulation? What’s that?” asked Gon.

“It’s a Manipulation ability that targets yourself,” said Bisky. “It’s extremely rare, but they can let a Manipulator, or in this case a Specialist, kind of cheat the limitations on their category by letting them increase their power more efficiently than they could with Ken, Ko, or Ryu. I can’t tell you that much else since I’ve never seen one myself, but I’ve heard they can have _weird_ effects. You’re pushing some of your aura into something else, but then re-projecting it back through your own body… and you said this ability was active when you lost consciousness?”

“Either it stayed active, or it re-activated after her skull was crushed,” said Killua.

“Hmm...” Bisky scowled. “I’m no expert on Residual Nen, but I’ve never heard of it happening with an ability that was inactive, only one that was active when the user dies. It must have not deactivated when you lost consciousness. But in that case, why did it only act after you died?”

Pitou shrugged. “Terspichora is based off of another ability, Puppeteer, which remains active even if I’m asleep. It’s supposed to read commands directly from my brain, letting me fight even if my body is paralyzed, so even if it didn’t deactivate when I lost consciousness, Terpsichora shouldn’t have caused any movement. Maybe I accidentally left the programming from Puppeteer in it, but that still shouldn’t have done anything since I didn’t give it instructions.”

Bisky shook her head. “My own Hatsu happens to act semiautonomously, so I can tell you that your emotions can give a Nen construct subconscious instructions. In this case, ‘Kill Gon’ probably.”

Killua raised his hand. “Hey. I’ve got an idea about why it didn’t do anything at first. You said the thing reads your brainwaves, but even unconscious you still have them, right?”

“Yes.” Pitou’s pupils dilated. “Ohhh… I see your point. It would interpret that as a command to do nothing. And Puppeteer wasn’t intended for use on living targets, so it makes sense that its programming would only kick in when no neural activity was detected at all.” Then her face darkened. “But that only explains half the puzzle. The only way I can possibly think of that I could have been healed after that is Asclepius.”

“Asclepius?” asked Bisky.

Smoke started to curl from Gon’s ears halfway through Pitou’s description of the ability. Bisky, however, continued to scribble furiously.

“So, you’ve never actually used this ability before?” Bisky asked.

“No,” said Pitou. “It didn’t even activate.”

“Ordinarily I’d say if you can’t activate it at all you never developed it in the first place… but it sounds like you were able to create the others extremely quickly. Anyway, the main reason for an otherwise functional Hatsu to not activate at all is if you didn’t satisfy a condition for its activation. Otherwise, partial activation is more common. What restrictions did you set when you created it?”

“The only one was that I could only use it to restore a dead person if I was there when they died.”

“All right. And you tested it by trying to bring back Kite, correct? I think Gon’s theory is most likely correct: if his soul was already in another living body, then putting it back in his original body would be impossible.”

“Hang on a minute...” Gon rubbed his overheated forehead. “So, you’re saying it’s actually possible to bring someone back from the dead with Nen?”

“Uhh...” Bisky didn’t sound like she wanted to commit to an answer. “I _think_ I remember hearing about someone who could do it, but I’m not sure how reliable the source was. It was from back in the 1400s when medical science wasn’t as advanced, so it’s possible they weren’t really dead and he just healed them. But it being possible is certainly the simplest explanation for all the facts.”

“Hang on!” Pitou interrupted. “I also tested Asclepius on multiple other targets – animals, humans, and grunt-level Chimera Ants. They couldn’t have placed their souls into new bodies, but it still didn’t activate.”

“Huh.” Bisky scribbled something else in her notepad and squinted at it. “I assume you made sure that they met the condition?”

“Yes.” Pitou glanced nervously at Gon and Killua. “All the test subjects were either killed by me or I observed their deaths.”

“Okay...” said Bisky. “I think I might have an idea. This is pure conjecture, but if you’re trying to bring someone back from the dead, you’d need to pull their soul back from wherever the soul goes after death, right? But, how do you know which soul?”

“Any dead body would only have one soul that inhabited it,” said Pitou. “I assumed that would be enough information.”

“Makes sense to me,” added Killua. “If Nen comes from the soul, but when Ikalgo uses his ability to control a corpse, he can use Nen abilities it had when it was alive, that means there has to be some kind of imprint on the body, right?”

Bisky shrugged. “Maybe. But suppose you’re wrong, and that isn’t enough information? Suppose you need something else, like a deep emotional connection to the target? I think it’s safe to say you never had that, right? Or you need some other important piece of information that the target’s soul would respond to, like their name?”

“The animals and the grunt ants didn’t have names, and I didn’t know any of the humans’. I didn’t even know Kite’s at the time.”

“Well, that’s the most likely explanation then,” said Bisky. “Resurrection must require additional information about the target which you didn’t have, in addition to any actual conditions. But you obviously know your own name, and I suppose _technically_ you’d have been there when you were killed.”

“Something still doesn’t add up though,” said Killua. “You just said Nen abilities can’t activate after death, only stay active. So how could Pitou use Asclepius?”

“That’s a good question. But I could be wrong about that. It’s also possible that Pitou was medically dead, but not spiritually dead. In that case, strong emotion could still activate an ability unconsciously.”

“So what you’re saying is, my soul may not have actually left my body?” asked Pitou.

“Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” Bisky said.

“Then another possibility is that it was only possible for Asclepius to bring me back because my soul was still there, and under normal circumstances using Nen for resurrection is still impossible.” Pitou sighed, and shut her eyes. “I need to test this...”

“Uhh, by test, you mean?...” asked Bisky.

“I’m not going to kill anyone to test it. But if I have an opportunity… I have to know. I have to know if it really works, and this entire time I could have saved the King, but I didn’t know it was possible!”

“The King...” Killua’s eyes grew to the size of Bisky’s teacup. “Bisky… if you’re right, and Pitou does have the power to bring back the dead, doesn’t that mean?...”

“No.” Pitou shook her head sadly, her ears drooping. “That’s not possible even if Asclepius does work. I wasn’t there when Meruem died, or Komugi. Nothing I could do now could bring them back. But if I’d known about it… if nothing else, the healing component of it would have let me reattach Meruem’s severed arm much faster. And in the attack, I could have healed Komugi faster, or been able to move her to safety or heal you, letting me protect the King...”

“But you couldn’t have protected him.” Gon laid a hand on her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known about the bomb. Morel told me about Mr. Netero’s plan after I woke up. If everyone wasn’t able to separate Meruem from you and Pouf and Youpi, one way or another the Chairman would still have died fighting you. And if you were close enough for it to count as satsifying your condition, you would have just been caught up in the explosion anyway.” He took a deep breath. “It’s like what Kite told me. All this time I thought if I hadn’t gone into NGL with him, he wouldn’t have been distracted, and he wouldn’t have died. But Kite said he would have still approached the nest, and the same thing would still have happened. It… it still feels like it’s my fault for being too weak back then, but I couldn’t have stopped him from dying by doing things differently. So… I guess it’s the same with you. You couldn’t have known about it, so don’t feel bad about doing everything you could have done.”

“Kite...” Pitou repeated. Her iridescent eyes stared into Gon’s. “I want to see him.”

“Huh?”

“You said he’s alive, right? I know at least the healing function of Asclepius should work. So… I think I might be able to restore his original body.”

“It can do that?”

“I’m not certain, but possibly. I’d like to try… if nothing else, as a way of apologizing to all three of you.”

“I’m not sure if Kite will care that much,” said Gon. “But we can call him – or her, I’m not really sure – later. I haven’t told Kite you’re alive, anyway, so he probably deserves to know.”

The airship’s swaying grew more severe. The fur on Pitou’s tail stood on end and she grabbed at the desk of the computer kiosk for stability, gripping so hard that her claws tore through the plastic. There was a mechanical chime, and a lighted sign flashed overhead.

“The captain has turned on the ‘fasten seatbelts’ sign,” a prerecorded voice said. “For your own safety, all passengers please return to your seats.”

“Uh oh.” Gon glanced at Killua. “The airship won’t crash, right?”

“Nah.” Killua still had his hands in his pockets. “But we’re gonna get kicked off the computer in a second.”

“All right. Bisky, I’ll call you back when we land!” Gon said. “There’s a couple other things I wanted to ask about!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • IMC = Instrument Meteorological Conditions, a term Killua knows since he’s apparently qualified to fly an airship. I imagine Killua also likes to look at charts of the routes and weather radar and stuff like that whenever he flies.  
>  • Poor Pitou doesn’t seem to like airships much.  
>  • I seriously dislike Palm. She is a thousand times creepier than Pitou ever was, and has no excuse for it. Regardless of whether or not Gon was too naive and innocent to know what a date was, Palm, a grown woman who almost certainly knew what a date was, attempted to coerce a thirteen-year-old boy into dating her using physical threats when she knew he’d literally lost his ability to defend himself by being forced into Zetsu by IRS. And then everyone on the mission acted like it was totally cool because she risked her life like they did. I understand Gon being like this since he’s a naive child, but Killua or any of the adults considering this person a friend is screwed up. Palm in CA Arc is pretty much like Hisoka in Greed Island Arc: a temporary ally they have to work with because their goals align and their power’s kind of necessary, but the kind of ally you keep at arm’s length and definitely stay the hell away from once the mission is over.  
>  • Headcanons on Specialist water divination. Meleoron makes the leaf become translucent. Meruem makes the entire thing glow. A powerful specialist could boil or freeze their water, weaker ones might change its temperature. Kurapika using Emperor Time? Probably makes all five of the things for the other types happen at once – the leaf moves, the water gains in volume, and it turns scarlet, has darker-colored particles form in it, and starts to taste like blood.


	7. Atonement x And x Kite

“So, we talked about it with Bisky, and it sounds like what probably happened is… uh...” Gon glanced nervously at Killua. “A little help here?”

“One of Pitou’s Nen abilities was able to activate after her death because something kept her soul from leaving her body properly. It sounds like it might’ve had something to do with her main combat ability, but there’s no way of knowing for certain.” Killua fished another gummy worm out of the bag he was holding.

“Yeah, that.” Gon smiled. Kite’s expression remained unchanged. “She had another ability that she created to try to bring you back, but it didn’t work because either you need to know a dead person’s name or you need a close connection with them, which Pitou didn’t have. But I guess it’s hard to have a closer connection than with yourself, right?”

“I suppose,” Kite answered. “But, if Pitou has an ability that can actually bring back the dead, isn’t that a huge risk? What if they were to resurrect the King with it?”

“It’s not possible for me to do that.” Pitou hadn’t been giving the video call with Kite her full attention. The bright colors of the cartoon Alluka was watching on the hotel room’s TV, and the noise her sensitive ears picked up despite Alluka using headphones, had distracted her. But now she slid herself into view of the webcam, her eyes locked onto the image of Kite’s on the screen. Her face was completely serious. “The condition I set for Asclepius was that I could only bring a person back if I was present when they died.”

Kite’s reaction wasn’t as extreme as Bisky’s, but his eyes noticeably widened. “Wait… what?”

“Damnit, Gon!” Killua elbowed him. “I thought you were gonna tell him what happened in order this time!” but he was clearly trying not to laugh.

“I was trying!” Gon protested. “But I had to explain why Pitou’s alive first, didn’t I? Besides, I wasn’t expect her to answer Kite’s question before I could tell him about what happened in the hospital!”

“It’s okay. I think I understand,” said Kite. “It’s a similar situation to me and Koala, right? I just wasn’t expecting that from you after hearing about what you did to beat Pitou before.”

“You mean that Ant with the suit who was there when I talked to you before?” asked Gon. “I don’t know. I don’t think you told me about him.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Kite took a sip of coffee. “I guess I didn’t. He came here a little before you did, and told me he’d shot a young girl who looked almost like I do now...”

“...Isn’t that like slavery?” Gon asked when Kite had finished his explanation.

“No. It’s more like a prison sentence,” said Kite. “Koala killed innocent people, both as an ant and in his previous life as a human. A single apology doesn’t just erase that. I gave him a chance to atone for his crimes and do something good by helping me.”

“Oh.” Gon rested his chin on his hand. “But, Killua used to be an assassin too. Only it was because that was how his family raised him. And, Ikalgo used to be part of NGL’s secret army, back when he was human, but he’s a good person now.”

“I don’t know enough about Killua or Ikalgo to pass any kind of judgement, and I don’t have any connection to their past actions. It’s none of my business,” Kite said plainly. “I made the arrangement with Koala because he came to me and asked for my forgiveness.”

“I have to disagree about Koala’s actions being cowardly,” Killua said, raising a finger and pointing nonchalantly at the screen. “He was a soldier. There were Officer and Squadron Leader level Ants killing for sport. If he’d attacked the ones who were torturing people, he’d just have been killed himself and they’d have kept doing it. Best case scenario he might have stopped the torture, but all those people would still have been killed and fed to the Queen. He most likely saved far more people than he could have by fighting.”

Gon gave a short, huffing sigh and shrugged. “Anyway… it’s not really like that. Pitou did apologize to me, but...” He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. “Kite, a while back, you asked me what I would’ve done if I met an Ant that cared for its friends… I know the answer now. At first, I just blocked it out, and made myself believe it wasn’t true. I know what I did was probably necessary, because there’s no other way I could have won that fight… and I don’t know if I could have killed Pitou back then if I knew… but now, I can’t stop myself from feeling bad about it. And everything else. Even if millions of people would’ve died if we hadn’t killed the King, I still feel guilty because of how much losing him hurt her. So… we both ended up apologizing. And right now, I just… when I found out you were dead, it happened so fast, but I wanted someone, anyone, to help, and I thought it was all my fault, and I think maybe if I hadn’t stopped Killua from coming with me, and I wasn’t alone… I don’t know. I just didn’t want Pitou to have to be alone when she’d lost everyone important to her.”

Gon was worried Kite would be angry that he had… not forgiven exactly, but at least made peace with Pitou. Even if Kite was alive, Pitou was still the reason he was stuck in that body that was so different from his real one. Pitou was still supposed to be an enemy, the enemy that Kite had told him he needed to be able to kill without hesitation. “I guess I’m not cut out to be a hunter like you,” he said. His eyes felt wet.

But to Gon’s surprise, Kite smiled, shut his eyes, and shook his head. “Gon. As a hunter, it’s sometimes necessary to kill enemies who don’t deserve to die because they’re a threat to you or others. And in a fight for your life, you can’t hesitate. But it would concern me a lot more if you were able to kill without feeling anything. You need to be able to put those feelings aside when you have to, but being unable to sympathize with someone once you decide they’re an enemy is also dangerous.

“Oh.”

“Anyway.” Kite’s purple eyes stared out from the screen. “Pitou. I can tell from the look in your eyes that you’re not the same person I fought before. Did you end up remembering your human life?”

“I don’t think I had one,” Pitou answered. “I was curious about that, since several of the Squadron Leaders reported having those memories, but it sounds like the Queen started consuming more humans when she was preparing for the birth of me, Pouf, Youpi, and Meruem. If I inherited the genes of a hundred humans, and the King a thousand, which of their souls would stay in our bodies?”

“A thousand humans?” Kite didn’t sound surprised. “Colt did tell me she was consuming dozens every day. It makes sense that you could be completely new beings in that case. Well… I won’t ask about what you worked out with Gon. If he’s willing to accept a simple apology, that’s his decision.”

“Well, actually part of why I called was because -”

“I want to apologize to you!” Pitou interrupted. “Back then… it was my duty to eliminate threats to the Queen until the King was born, but all I cared about at that moment was testing myself, and my own enjoyment. I didn’t understand anything about the consequences of destroying other lives. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do anything for any of the others I’ve harmed, but I think my power might be able to restore your original body.”

Kite raised an eyebrow. “Might?”

Pitou explained how Asclepius worked.

“So, in other words, to restore my original body, it would have to take this one apart completely, down to the cellular or even level, and then rebuild it completely? Similar to a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly?”

“That’s right,” said Pitou. “If it’s able to extract information about your old body from your soul, it should be able to reconstruct it. However, since your soul was reborn into a new body, Asclepius might recognize the new body as the real one, in which case it would do nothing.”

Kite scowled. “Yes, that’s one way it could fail. But what if it tries to rebuild my body and you run out of aura partway through? I assume you can tell that this body is quite a bit lighter than my old one was, and it sounds like you have to create the extra mass out of nothing. You also said regenerating your head from scratch completely exhausted you. Can you guarantee you have enough aura to do it?”

“Not in a single attempt. I originally considered the possibility that a resurrection from an incomplete body could require multiple uses of Asclepius.”

“Then I refuse.” Kite folded his arms. “It’s annoying having to wait for this body to mature, but otherwise I don’t care that much. And I don’t bear a grudge against you for what happened to me. You defeated me in a fair fight, and I knew death was a possibility when I went into NGL. However, I’m not about to stake my life on an untested power working just so you can atone for your sins. As it stands, if you run out of aura halfway through rebuilding my body, I’ll die, and you don’t know whether you can bring me back if that happens. It’s too big a risk.”

Pitou’s eyes sank to the sheets. “I understand. I wasn’t thinking. You’re right that it would be dangerous.”

Kite’s eyes softened slightly. “Don’t worry. Like I said, I have no grudge against you. If you can verify that your power works, I might consider it. For now, I’ll wait for this body to mature. I should be able to use Nen again and get back to my job in a few months or so.”

“Really? That’s great!” said Gon.

“What are you planning on doing now, Gon?” Kite asked. “You said you met Ging, right?”

“Yeah. He said he was planning an expedition to an unexplored continent, which sounds fun, but it also sounds like you need to be really strong to go there, and I can’t use Nen either right now. I was planning to go home to Whale Island, but...” Gon looked back at Pitou. “Explaining things to Aunt Mito will probably be awkward, so I’m not totally sure. And then… Bisky said my aura seems normal now. She said opening my aura nodes by force again would probably kill me, but I should be able to learn Nen again if I open them the normal way. I don’t know how long it will take, starting from scratch, but… I want to get stronger, so I never have to let someone die because I’m too weak to help them again.”

“I’m probably gonna just travel around with my sister for a while, since we haven’t spent much time together for a few years,” volunteered Killua. “We’ll split up in a few days. Not sure when we’ll see each other in person, it kinda depends on what happens.”

“Not a bad plan,” said Kite. “Anyway, Pitou, there is something you can do. One of my team members, Banana Kavaro, is conducting a genetic study of the human Chimera Ants to learn more about the Phagogenesis process. A blood sample from you would be very helpful.”

“Genetics… interesting.” Pitou smiled, and her tail twitched back and forth. “I think I read something about that. Will it tell me what kinds of animals I came from besides humans and cats?”

“Probably,” said Kite. “There isn’t data on every species, especially since there are several unknown ones in NGL. For example, we haven’t identified what type of bird Coltopi’s wings came from.”

“Hmm. I’d be glad to send you a sample, on the condition you tell me the results.”

“That’s a deal, then.”

“That reminds me...” Killua said. “I’ve been wondering something. Knov said something about soldier Ants trying to breed with females of other species if the Queen dies, but that would imply that they’re male, right?”

“Normally,” said Kite.

“So...” Killua fidgeted awkwardly with the neck of his turtleneck. “Pitou, what are you, exactly? Is it like Alluka where you’re a girl but were born with a boy’s body, or is it like my little brother Kalluto where you’re a boy but just kind of look like a girl, or what?”

“Uhh… I’m not sure how to answer that,” said Pitou. “Isn’t the difference only relevant to reproduction?”

“It’s… more complicated. I don’t really know how to explain it either. I guess it’s just like… what your body is, versus what you feel...” Killua’s normally pale face was starting to turn red.

“Well, I don’t know which reproductive organs I have. Royal Guards don’t reproduce anyway, as far as I know. My body is closer to a female human than a male human, though, so I think ‘girl’ is more appropriate, but I don’t care that much how others refer to me.”

“Wait… how do you not know?” Gon asked. “Isn’t it pretty obvious one way or the other?”

“Only if you’re a human!” said Killua. “Some of the ants were walking around with no pants on, and it didn’t exactly seem like they needed them, but they talked like guys!”

“Ohhh...” Gon’s face lit up. “I see… so, it’s like birds and fish where you can’t really tell?”

“I dunno, you’re the one who knows about animals!”

Kite snorted and suppressed a laugh. “Your question about why most, but not quite all, Chimera Ant soldiers are male actually has a very interesting answer.”

“Really? I wanna know!” Gon leaned forward, his eyes shining with curiosity.

“I want to hear this, too.” Pitou’s ears were standing at attention, and her pupils had dilated like a cat preparing to pounce on a toy. “Peggy’s books had plenty of information about human biology, but nothing about our own.”

“All right,” said Kite. “So, you boys are familiar with how sex determination works in humans, right? Two X chromosomes means a baby will be born female, a Y chromosome means it will be born male?”

“Yeah.” Gon nodded.

“Well, that’s true for most mammals and some reptiles, but not for all animals. In some species it’s the male that has two identical sex chromosomes. In others, there’s only one sex chromosome, and an individual will be male if it has two copies of it and female if it has only one, or vice versa. But think about how Chimera Ants reproduce. Do you think any of those systems would work?”

“No,” answered Killua. “A Chimera Ant never reproduces with others of its own species, and if they used chromosomes from either organisms a queen consumed or a king mated with, they would be limited to species which had the same sex determination system as them, right?”

“I don’t think it would work that way even then, but otherwise you’re correct. Now, ordinary ants use a different system called Haplodiploidy. Humans are diploid organisms, which means that our cells all contain pairs of chromosomes which, apart from the X and Y chromosomes, are almost identical. Our reproductive organs produce sperm or egg cells, which are haploid – they only have one chromosome from each pair. When an egg is fertilized, the sperm and egg combine and the zygote gets one chromosome of each pair from the father and one from the mother, resulting in a new diploid cell. However, in ants, bees, and wasps, there aren’t any sex chromosomes at all – instead a fertilized egg develops into a female worker or queen, and unfertilized eggs develop into a haploid male drone. So, would that system work for Chimera Ants?”

“Uhh...” A warning puff of steam escaped Gon’s ear. “So, queens give birth to males because their eggs aren’t fertilized, and then kings fertilize… wait, no, uh… I don’t know?”

“The answer is that it wouldn’t,” said Kite. “Because it still has the problem that there are no homologous chromosomes in the host’s egg cells for a king’s sperm to pair off with. Chimera Ants are the only known animal species which is completely haploid. Their chromosomes change radically with each generation as DNA is integrated from prey and mate species and discarded.”

“Then what makes one ant male and one female on a genetic level?” asked Killua.

Kite smiled. “On a genetic level? Nothing at all. Chimera Ant sex determination isn’t genetic at all, and there’s no difference between the DNA of a male and a female. Instead, it’s determined by environment, similar to crocodiles where sex is determined by the temperature of the egg during incubation. We haven’t isolated the compound responsible, but the leading hypothesis is that a hormone produced by a queen causes an embryo to become male. In that hormone’s absence – that is, if an embryo develops in the womb of another species – the ant will be female.”

“Then you and I are technically male?” asked Pitou.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Kite. “Because phagogenesis is a complicated process. Some sort of enzyme in the digestive system of a queen can extract intact DNA from food and deliver it to the ovaries, where somehow it gets sorted and genes which encode certain features are integrated into the genomes of unfertilized egg cells. Similarly, Chimera Ant sperm have as much in common with an egg or even a virus than a normal sperm cell. In addition to DNA, they deliver a payload of enzymes which take over the egg cell and dismantle and integrate its genes. 

We still don’t know how it works, but it almost seems like there’s something intelligent in the process – if it were random, the odds of the resulting mishmash of DNA producing even an organism with functioning organ systems would be nearly nonexistent – let alone one capable of fending for itself and reproducing. It somehow picks out useful genes, and most likely it can somehow identify what traits are associated with male or female organisms of different species, and attempt to express them in a developing embryo. This includes the obvious, but it probably also includes secondary sex characteristics – bone structure, tone of voice, and even any differences in brain structure. But nothing that complex can be infallible. The molecular machinery is bound to occasionally make mistakes, especially in this generation where there are so many diverse sources of DNA, many of which are extremely different taxonomically from ants.

In my case, this body most likely has a female brain structure or something similar, so I don’t feel like there’s anything ‘wrong’ with it. Scans showed that the gonads were also undifferentiated and undeveloped. It’s too early to tell for sure, but I’m most likely completely sterile. However, this could also be due to my being a twin of the King and my embryo being improperly nourished during development. But if Banana’s hypothesis is correct, then both my condition and Pitou’s is something similar to Swyer Syndrome in humans. That’s a disorder where an embyro develops as a female despite having XY chromosomes and being genetically male, and results in sterility. The Ant equivalent would be receiving the hormonal signal that should cause maleness, but the body developing as a sterile individual with a female-like phenotype.”

“Huh.” Pitou had listened intently for the entire lecture. “I think I get it nyow. That would explain why Zazan was asking me if Doctor Blythe could be used to produce more soldiers for the colony if something happened to the Queen.”

“Zazan?” asked Kite.

“One of the squadron leaders. She must have been similar to you and I – and I know she was making her subordinates call her Queen when she thought no one could hear. She complained to me that something must have been wrong with her body since she wasn’t producing eggs.”

Killua sighed. “Okay, I have to ask… do you mean she was trying to make eggs like a normal queen, or do you mean she… like… tried to do it like a king but in reverse.”

“You mean, by trying to mate with other species?” Pitou shrugged, looking part irritated, part disgusted. “I didn’t ask. I think she might have mentioned trying multiple methods, but she was disrupting my work, and my hostility scared her out of the chamber before she said anything else. She came back a while later and started asking about creating soldiers with my power – I was considering killing her, but Pouf overheard and it gave him an idea...”

“Lemme guess… creating Ants out of humans?” Killua’s tone gave the impression that he didn’t want to hear an answer. “Anyway, we should probably change the subject before Gon sets off the smoke alarm.” He pointed to the billowing clouds erupting from his friend’s head. “Are you sure you didn’t steal Morel’s ability by accident?”

“No...” Gon groaned. “I think I’m going to watch cartoons with Alluka for a while. It was nice talking to you, though, Kite!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • And so, Gon and Killua failing to include the fact that they made peace with Pitou and are now traveling with her became a running gag.  
>  • So, I’m still using male pronouns for Kite despite him being in a female body now.  
>  • Kite’s approach to Koala in episode 147 is… interesting. “Oh, you apologized to me because you were crushed with guilt over your actions? Congratulations, you’re now my slave for life. You’ll be by my side all the time so you’ll be constantly reminded of the person you feel guilty for killing. And if you object to any of this, I’ll kill you.” I know this universe is kind of messed up, but this seems like a really poor approach to therapy.  
>  • My headcanon is that Killua is relatively woke on trans stuff, but is still an awkward teen/preteen who only knows about sex on a theoretical level. Gon lives in a rural community that probably has a few farm animals and he spent a lot of time in the woods, so he knows more than you’d think, but hasn’t really connected it to humans yet. And Pitou has a clinical, superficial understanding gained entirely from skimming over portions of Peggy’s biology and medicine books.  
>  • If anyone has a more complicated “Pitou’s Gender” headcanon I want to see it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to put this giant infodump in my story, but it made for an interesting character interaction. Kite is a badass Hunter, but his normal job is as a scientist, so we need more of him being a massive nerd. Gon is innocently curious and smart, but getting all that information about a technical topic presented that way? Of course his head will explode.

**Author's Note:**

> • Every single time I rewatch the Chimera Ant Arc I’m like: “Man, Gon vs. Pitou was such a tragedy. Pitou has such a good, interesting personality and seemed to be finally learning empathy before her character development got cut short, and is so similar to Gon and Killua in some ways, and it seems like they could be friends if they’d met under different circumstances.” Then I try to find fanfics where Pitou survives, and every time I end up finding pretty much nothing, and I think “y’know, I should write something,” but then don’t because I’m busy with other stuff. Well, I finally bit the bullet and actually wrote it.  
> • Full disclosure, I’ve only seen the anime, I’m avoiding reading the manga because I don’t want to be caught in the vicious cycle of Hiatus X Hiatus. I’ve heard a little bit about what goes on, but I’m just going to treat this as diverging from canon after the final episode of the anime.  
> • I came up with the idea of Asclepius like two years ago, and I’ll admit it’s kind of an asspull, but it lets Pitou survive without losing the emotional impact of what happened on Gon and Killua. Also, from what I heard Hisoka did something very similar – giving yourself CPR with Residual Nen is obviously less extreme than regrowing your head from nothing, but Hisoka was just using bungee gum and didn’t, y’know, canonically attempt to resurrect a dead person with Nen already.  
> • I’m planning to post this on Reddit at some point, so there might be someone arguing about Pitou’s gender. First, to my knowledge it was never actually confirmed one way or the other, so I do what I want. Second, as mentioned this is anime canon, and in the anime Pitou is voiced by a woman and has more feminine proportions, so I’m gonna use she/her pronouns. A later chapter will have more explanation on the “but Chimera Ant soldiers are supposed to be male” situation.  
> • So, in the “write what you know” category, I have a mild case of emetophobia and a year or so ago a medication I was taking was causing frequent nausea as a side effect. Let me tell ya, it fucking sucked because the stress of being afraid of throwing up just makes you feel even sicker. And the ab cramps hurt, especially when you’re on an empty stomach or you’re sore for any other reason. Vomiting after the kick Gon gave Pitou would be pure torture.  
> • Smartphones get broken screens when you drop them off a table. Aura or no aura, if you get hit hard enough to fly a mile crashing through rocks and tree trunks, and it’s in your pocket, that thing ain’t coming out in one piece. Maybe Pitou should have bought a Beetle Phone like Gon? But then it wouldn’t fit in the pockets of that jacket or those shorts.  
> • The scene of Asclepius activating was inspired by the scene in Hellraiser where Frank is resurrected, as well as by the Elrics’ original human transmutation attempt in FMA.


End file.
